It’s been two months since Dr. Jesse Berry and her family lost almost everything in Los Angeles’ historically destructive wildfires.
Still, she is grateful that amid the devastation, friends, family and even her patients have rallied round her.
“It’s been really special and really unexpected. I would say the only thing that moved faster than that fire — which I’ll never forget how fast that fire moved — was how much kindness and love swept around us,” Berry tells PEOPLE.
The 43-year-old ophthalmic surgeon and director of the Vision Center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles vividly remembers how the blaze swept toward her house in Altadena, Calif., in January.
On Jan. 7, she was working from home when the power went out. Thinking nothing of it, she and her husband, Paul Comas, decided to take their two daughters, Lillian and Daphne, ages 3 and 5, to dinner.
Berry was strapping the girls into their car seats when her husband came over and said, “Look, there’s fire. There’s smoke,” she recalls. “We saw two helicopters go over.”
Her husband told her to go back into the house and pack an overnight bag. They needed to leave.
Courtesy of Jesse Berry
So Berry grabbed her hospital scrubs and then “I looked at my dish of jewelry and thought, ‘Why would I bring any of this? I’m operating the next day,’ “ she says.
“I remember feeling a little jittery and saying to myself, ‘Jess, you’re a surgeon. You know how to focus when stuff hits the fan. Just focus and pack an overnight bag,’ “ she says. “I took pajamas for my kids, socks and underwear, really nothing.”
She grabbed her travel bag, but regrets not grabbing the passports and wallet that were right beside it.
All around, the situation was getting worse.“It’s a little scary. It’s dark. The winds are howling. After 10 minutes, my husband comes in and he’s like, ‘Jess, now — you need to get out of here now. You need to take the girls out of here now,’ ” Berry says.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
When she walked outside, she could see the fire going up the hill of their Eaton Canyon neighborhood.
“My husband’s yelling, ‘Just go!’ It’s wild. I didn’t bring their stuffies. I didn’t bring anything. I ran in the car and then my husband ran back into the house,” she says. “The whole mountain is on fire now. You could see the whole canyon.”
While Comas went back inside “to grab a couple of things,” Berry went on ahead, driving down past downed trees and flying embers, when her husband, who works as an actor and model, texted her that he was stuck because without power he couldn’t open the gate.
“We’re like, ‘Oh my God, do I drive back up? There’s a way to hike down. Does he hike down on foot and I meet him there?’ ” Berry says.
Valerie Tabor Smith
Luckily, Comas was able to manually open the gate, help their 80-year-old neighbors and reunite with his wife and daughters at the designated meeting spot, a Mexican restaurant.
They went to a hotel and, by early the next morning, learned that their house — their entire neighborhood — had burned down. Soon came word that their kids’ school had also been destroyed, as was their favorite pizza place and the place where Lillian and Daphne took tennis and ballet lessons.
“Overnight we woke up to a complete untethering,” Berry says. “Imagine your whole entire life — not just everything you own, but everything you love, everything you do, your day to day — just evaporating.”
Berry went back to the hospital three days later. She treats eye cancer in adults and children. Since the fire, the family has been staying with friends; they had to enroll their children as “homeless” when registering them at their new school.
It’s hard — for Berry and her family as much as for the thousands of other displaced L.A. residents, as well as relatives of the victims who perished in the fire.
Valerie Tabor Smith
Courtesy of Jesse Berry
There has been a silver lining in how the family has been showered in love and support, Berry says.
She has also formed deep bonds with some of her patients who reached out to help.
“It was unexpected and humbling how many people showed up in so many different ways,” she says, “from ‘I’m sending toothbrushes to your hotel room right now for you and the kids and socks,’ to cards, texts, check-ins, following up, reaching out to other people to say, ‘Have you talked to Jess and her family? How’s Paul? How are the girls?’ “
“It really has just been a stunning show of kindness,” she says.
“Initially, I wasn’t even sure that I could accept it or that I wanted to accept it,” she continues.
But then “one of my patients, who is now an adult but had retinalblastoma as a baby said, ‘You can’t refuse this. Just like you wouldn’t let us refuse treatment and you wouldn’t let us refuse your care. We are standing by you in this and standing by your family, and we are going to love you and support you and rally for you, and we will not allow you to not accept our help.’ That probably broke me down and allowed me to open up to it. We feel really devastated and untethered but really loved.”
Read the full article here
