This facelift is much more than cosmetic

Big Sur Health Center undergoes much-needed overhaul

Sharen Carey stoops low to sweep up bits of the front door of the Big Sur Health Center with a broom. She came to work one day, pushed in on the doorknob, and the bottom half of the door just kind of fell apart from dry rot.

“This is why we are so desperate to get a new building, as you can see,” says Carey, a physician assistant who has worked for 17 years at the center, the only provider of healthcare between Carmel and Cambria.

This rendering of the new Big Sur Health Center was created by Veronica Gross of Los Gatos.

Housed in a 35-year-old, weatherbeaten modular facility in a grove of oak trees just off Highway 1 next to the Big Sur Campground, the health center desperately needs a facelift. Plans are currently under way to construct a new building to serve the many patients who come through the crumbling front door each year for everything from annual checkups to painful ear infections to hiking injuries. Community Hospital has made a grant of $20,000 through its Community Benefit Program to help defray the $200,000 cost of the project. The hospital has also supported the center over the years in many other ways.

Plans include six instead of three rooms, including an additional exam room; much needed insulation; more storage space; and, of course, a new front door. Pending approval from the county, the center will be housed in a new, larger modular building at the same spot, land donated by All Saints Episcopal Church in Carmel. All, hopefully, by September.

“We’ve been patching things together for years,” Carey says, looking up at the center’s pressedwood sides topped with a tin roof. “It’s held up pretty doggone well over the years. But sometimes I feel like we’re held together with chewing gum.”

In a community where it takes at least an hour to get into “town” to find the nearest hospital or pharmacy, the center provides an important community service. It furnishes prescription drugs to patients, for example, so they don’t have to make the hour-long drive until they’re feeling better. The center also provides a homey atmosphere and holistic approach, which Big Sur residents have come to depend on over the years.

“When I went to medical school, I had this image of being a doctor during the horse-and-buggy days,” says medical director Deborah Biller, M.D., who has worked at the center with Carey for 17 years. “This is real close to that ideal. You can take time with your patients here. It’s great.”

The center, open five days a week, had 2,500 patient visits last year. It serves the isolated communities of Big Sur and the thousands of tourists who pass through town every year. The community residents are a group of “hardy souls” who have helped make the center an integral part of the community.

“We have done some unique things over the years,” says Carey. Like propping up a lantern on the footrest of an exam table to conduct an annual gynecological exam when the electricity went out. Or flying in medical supplies by helicopter when Highway 1 was closed for an extended period during 1998.

The new facility will maintain the same “quaint, homey” atmosphere for which the current center is known, Carey says, only with added benefits. For example, the doctor and nurse won’t have to continue sharing the same space that houses the lab and storage areas, all in a small room that overheats in the summer and drops toward freezing in the winter.

“I’m just hoping to get a few more windows,” Biller says, adding that one patient was so overheated during a summer appointment that she wanted the exam room door left open while she had her Pap smear.

The center started in 1979 as a one-day-a-week gig run out of a kitchen in the community’s Grange Hall, three miles down Highway 1 from the current location. In 1985, it moved to the existing building, already 15 years old at the time. Now the center provides full-service healthcare five days a week.

And despite the cramped facilities, the community says it can’t do without it.

“I have a special feeling for it,” says Paul Vieregge, 81. A Big Sur resident who has been a patient at the center since it opened in 1979, he credits the center with saving his life at least once. “It’s so difficult to go into town to see a doctor. It’s a great community service.”