Community Voices: When Violence Strikes Health Care, None of Us Are Untouched

A week ago, I was preparing for a full day of cataract surgeries today—routine cases, complex ones, many involving patients I’ve known for years.

Then, on Saturday morning, I received an emergency alert from Desert Regional Medical Center. A bomb had exploded across the street from our surgery center, targeting a nearby fertility clinic. It was quickly labeled an act of domestic terrorism. As a cataract surgeon, I never imagined receiving instructions on how to report to work after a bombing. Yet here we are.

Although the blast didn’t directly hit our facility, it shook every corner of our medical campus. At our El Mirador Surgery Center, we had to halt all surgeries for safety reasons for at least several days. That meant calling patients who had been preparing for sight-restoring procedures and telling them they had to wait.

We often say medicine is a calling. Most of us enter the field because we want to help people. We stay in it, even as the health-care system grows more strained and chaotic, because we still believe in our purpose. But no part of our training prepares us for becoming collateral damage in an act of health-care violence. We don’t expect to fear for our staff. We don’t expect to fear for ourselves.

The ripple effects of violence in health care don’t stop at the walls of one clinic. They move through hallways and waiting rooms, through operating-room schedules and morning rounds, through team meetings and phone calls with anxious patients. When a bomb goes off outside a fertility center, it’s not just fertility doctors and their patients who are affected. It’s the oncologist two doors down. The pediatric nurse down the hall. The ophthalmologist across the street. Fear doesn’t distinguish between specialties.

The morning after the attack, I received an update from Ian Mullings, our surgery center administrator. The building was structurally sound, but we would remain closed for a time. I understood the need for caution. Still, it broke my heart.

Some of the patients we had to postpone had waited months for their procedures. For elderly individuals with worsening cataracts, these surgeries aren’t just about improved vision—they’re about reclaiming independence, driving again, recognizing loved ones’ faces. That loss of momentum matters.

Violence in a space dedicated to healing strikes a particularly cruel chord. But what’s equally tragic is how normalized the fallout is becoming for health-care workers. In recent years, threats against medical providers have grown more common. So have verbal abuse, harassment and physical attacks. Burnout was already rampant in our profession after the pandemic. This kind of trauma only deepens the wound.

The hardest part isn’t just the danger. It’s the conversations we’re now forced to have—with our staff about evacuation routes. With our patients about rescheduling their appointments. With our own children about why someone would bomb a doctor’s office.

And yet, amid this tragedy, something extraordinary has also emerged: solidarity.

In the hours after the bombing, I received messages online from patients expressing concern—not for their delayed surgeries, but for our team’s well-being. I saw nurses comforting each other, front-desk staff returning to work with quiet resolve, and physicians offering their time to colleagues stretched thin.

That kind of unity is more than comforting—it’s sustaining.

To my fellow doctors, nurses, technicians and administrative staff: Whether you deliver babies, restore sight or administer medicine, know this—you are not alone. Even if your office windows didn’t shatter, you likely felt this blast in some way. That ache is real, and it’s shared.

We cannot let violence in health care become the new normal. We cannot allow fear to displace our purpose. If we’re going to keep showing up for our patients, we must also show up for each other—with vigilance, empathy and courage.

Violence tries to silence. But our duty as physicians has always been to speak up—for our patients. For our safety. For our humanity.

Dr. Keith Tokuhara is a board-certified ophthalmologist at Desert Vision Center in Rancho Mirage, specializing in cataract surgery and ethical, patient-centered eye care.