Dolphin FIS Therapy Surfaces on the West Coast

Going home to West Coast

The freight half of this is the easy half. The I-5 corridor from Seattle to San Diego is one of the best-served lanes in the country, terminals are close together, and for the large majority of addresses on this coast the truck is not the constraint. Where that stops being true is off the corridor: the North Coast up Highway 101, the far northern counties, the Sierra foothills, and everything east of the Cascades. Those addresses behave more like the ones described on our Mountain West and High Plains page, with longer final legs and routes that close for slides in winter and for fire in summer.

The part worth doing early is not the freight, it is the utility. If someone at the address depends on powered medical equipment, it is worth asking the utility directly about its medical baseline program and about getting onto the advance-notification list for planned shutoffs. That is the utility’s process and its decision, not ours — we cannot enrol anyone or promise an outcome — but being on a notification list is the difference between two days of warning and none. Ask early, because enrollment is paperwork and paperwork is slower than a fire weather forecast.

Homes here, and what fits in them

The buildings here are more varied than anywhere else we deliver, and the pattern that recurs is the exterior stair. San Francisco and Seattle hillside homes put a flight of steps between the street and the front door with no driveway at the top. Los Angeles canyon houses do the same in reverse, with the living floor below the road. Converted garages and accessory dwelling units are used as care rooms across the region far more than elsewhere, which is usually good news — level entry, wide door — with one caveat, which is that a converted garage is often on a single circuit shared with a laundry. Tell us the route from the street, including the number of steps, before the day.

The other regional reality is that the equipment may have to leave. Evacuation warnings and orders in fire season are not rare events here, and a therapy surface is not something a family should be improvising about at two in the morning with a go-bag in the hall. What we ask people to settle in advance is simple: who moves the person, whether the system goes with them, and where it goes. The system itself travels better than most medical equipment — Joerns lists the mattress at 22 lb and the control unit at 10 lb, and states that the battery supports active therapy during patient transport — but the decision about whether moving the patient at all is appropriate belongs to the clinician, not to us and not to a website.