BY ED SUMMER
Los Alamos
To the senior citizens of Los Alamos: I know many of you have fond memories of raising your children in this community. I grew up here and also have fond memories of a bowling alley in White Rock, a popular movie theater, Gordon’s record store even had an arcade. There was ample pediatric care, a relatively excellent hospital, etc. You remember these things as well. It was a genuinely good place to raise a family. It is no longer the same place.
We moved back 3 years ago, and I’m sorry to say, the way this community is taking care of children is appalling. Forget that there is nothing to do, they’re not even admitting children at the hospital. Do you understand what that means? If a child gets sick and needs to go to the emergency room, they are transferred away to Santa Fe or Albuquerque as soon as possible. In our case, our daughter needed to be observed for a few hours after an emergency treatment. However, they can’t even observe her at Los Alamos Medical Center. hey wanted to airlift her to Albuquerque at the price of about $20,000, just so she could be observed for a few more hours. Madness.
If there was the desire, pediatric healthcare could be subsidized. The town has enough tax money to fund any range of projects. For example, the Senior Center got its $20 million, but when it came time to build a recreation center for the rest of us, tough luck. There was some convoluted political process that we are blaming for that failure, but we still don’t have a recreation center, yet we do have a world-class senior center.
The final nail in the coffin, and why we are moving back to civilization, was closing the Labor and Delivery department at LAMC. That has made it so abundantly clear that this place could care less about families. There is likely some bean counter reasoning behind the move, but this is not a normal small town, and sometimes there are factors other than money. Consider national defense, for instance. Los Alamos National Laboratory is no longer attracting the best of the best, because this town is a terrible place to live, and this healthcare situation is a huge part of it.
Los Alamos is losing a lot of energetic young families who want to build community, and I’m concerned you all aren’t noticing. Ask anyone who deals with retention at LANL; it’s a serious problem. It’s not a problem for you, but 20 years from now, when many of you, the elders who made this town great by building a strong community for yourselves, are gone as well, what will be left of this town we all loved?
“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.” -Proverb
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