Carin Hetzler-Nettles, center, is the choice to head up the new high school in Wesley Chapel.
Carin Hetzler-Nettles, who is credited with helping breathe fresh life into Wesley Chapel High (WCH) since taking over as principal in 2009, is moving on to a new challenge: opening a new school right down the road.
Hetzler-Nettles has been appointed the new principal at Cypress Creek Middle-High School (below), which is scheduled to open in time for the 2017-18 school year.
Cypress Creek is located on Old Pasco Rd. The new school will have close to 2,000 students (see page 10) in grades six through 11 next year, with a large portion of those former students at WCH who will be familiar with their new principal.
Hetzler-Nettles, 42, has been a district employee since 1996. She started as a special education teacher at River Ridge Middle School in New Port Richey, taught at East Bay High in Gibsonton and then returned to Pasco County when she took a teaching job at Mitchell before receiving a promotion to assistant principal in 2004.
While at WCH, Hetzler-Nettles was named the Secondary Principal of the Year in Pasco County for 2012.
Schuyler Arakawa and her mother Meridith Hankenson in their Citrus Park home.
Dyane Elkins IronWing can still picture Schuyler Arakawa as a long-haired little girl filled with fire, prancing around her New Tampa Dance Theatre (NTDT) floor in rainbow-colored socks, cowboy boots and a mini skirt, her beaming smile lighting up the room with an energy so pure it was impossible to resist.
When she looks at Schuyler today, Dyane says she sees the same thing. The smile is still bright, the dimples are irresistible, the energy still pure.
“She was angelic then, and angelic now,’’ Dyane says.
It’s as if nothing has changed, even if everything has.
On Feb. 19, Schuyler, her mother Meridith Hankenson, sister Saya and brother Lyndon will quietly mark a one-year anniversary that many in the same situation would rather forget.
Meridith doesn’t know if her youngest daughter ever saw the large boulder roll off the 30-foot-high cliff that day and plummet towards the water. Schuyler doesn’t remember it crashing into her face, driving her deep under the water, crushing her skull, breaking her leg, collapsing her lung, fracturing five vertebrae in her spine and almost killing her.
What they do know, however, is this: it changed their world forever.
Schuyler Arakawa with her sister Saya.
Today, Schuyler, who is 23 years old, is moving forward, with many of the same hopes and dreams she had before.
A former Arbor Greene resident and longtime student at the NTDT on Cross Creek Blvd., Schuyler had the world at her feet a year ago.
She is a Berkeley Prep and Yale University graduate, and was on a mission to make the world a better, happier place. There was nothing she couldn’t do.
Now, she is starting over.
She goes to therapy three days a week, travels once a week to Tarpon Springs for aqua therapy, takes a yoga class and is trying to learn how to speak again, how to get up out of her wheelchair and walk again.
She is still joyous, however, in an amazing sort of way. She breaks out into smiles and laughter while finishing off leftover tacos for lunch in the Citrus Park townhome she now lives in with her mother.
Forrest Maddox, a friend from Yale who visits from New York every few months, smiles and laughs with her, reaching over to rub her arm.
Frodo, the family’s 13-year-old dapple dachshund, clickety-clacks across the floor at her feet, a treat in her mouth, perhaps to keep it from Tinkerbell, their chocolate, long-haired dachshund.
It is a quiet, peaceful, normal day. Schuyler had physical therapy in the morning, ate a big lunch, and is looking forward to her daily three-hour afternoon nap.
Her therapy is exhausting. “Everything is hard,’’ she says, quietly. “But I have to do it.”
Schuyler getting a view of the Glacier National Park in Montana. Photo credit: Brontë Wittpenn
Schuyler had traveled the world to so many places before the boulder rolled off that cliff in Colombia. She helped children and adults to read in Tanzania, and had worked with a pistachio plantation that was the lifeblood of a village in Indonesia.
She made friends everywhere she went, and created for herself a worldwide social network to help benefit the less fortunate.
Schuyler’s passion was social enterprise, and on a brief break from building schools in Peru, she was enjoying the cool water during a rafting trip. She had taken a few days of vacation before what was going to be the second installation of a Yale-affiliated post-graduate fellowship, which involved weaving for the Threads of Peru, a not-for-profit social enterprise which spreads Peruvian culture and creates a sustainable market for the local artisans by selling handmade panchos, scarves and bracelets, to name a few.
Meridith remembers getting the phone call from one of Schuyler’s friends with her at the time, Dana, frantically telling her Schuyler had been hurt.
She might not live, the friend said. Meridith needed to get to Colombia.
So began a frantic, spellbinding and critical 72-hour period in which every minute mattered, and every decision was life or death.
Schuyler on a mission trip to Tanzania.
Meridith didn’t speak Spanish, and didn’t know anyone from Colombia, but she knew she needed help. She’s not sure why, but she posted a plea on Facebook.
One of Schuyler’s friends knew a woman who was originally from Colombia. Her name is Amalita Estrada, and her daughter had attended Berkeley Prep with Schuyler. Along with another family — Chris and Georgette Tsavoussis, whose daughter Alexis went to school with Schuyler and immediately created a GoFundMe page for her classmate that raised more than $200,000 — they began helping to pave Meridith’s way in and out of Colombia.
“I got a phone call as I was checking out at the grocery store, and for some reason I felt a connection instantly,’’ says Amalita, who had never met Schuyler or her mother. She had to look in her daughter’s yearbook to even see what Schuyler looked like.
She began making calls from her Tarpon Springs home, trying to get Meridith to Colombia, eventually booking her plane tickets.
She called her cousin, a neurosurgeon in Bogota, the capital of Colombia.
Amalita told him he needed help getting Schuyler to Bogota, where the main hospitals would be. He asked where Schuyler was, and Amalita told him Socorro, in the northeastern part of Colombia.
Her cousin told her to take a deep breath and relax. It just so happened that one of Colombia’s best neurosurgeons, and his former teacher, had retired to Socorro, a small town of 30,000. And not only that, he had built an Intensive Care Unit in the middle of this small city because there had been so many motorcycle accidents in the area.
“Out of his own heart and goodwill, he built that there, because there was a need,’’ Amalita said. Without it, it is unlikely Schuyler would be alive today.
“That saved her life,’’ Amalita says.
Schuyler had been pulled from the river by the tour guides, and transported along dirt roads to the hospital in Socorro. Amalita doesn’t know how they did it, but they had help from an American man, she says, who just happened to appear and helped them get Schuyler up the ravine and into a vehicle. No one saw him again.
“An angel,’’ Amalita explains, because how else would you?
At the ICU, doctors stabilized Schuyler, but the prognosis was still grim. Meridith and her two other children couldn’t get a flight out of Tampa, so they raced to Miami to catch the last one out that night to Colombia.
Meanwhile, the woman back in Tarpon Springs that they had never met and didn’t know was making calls, talking to doctors, organizing transportation and making the biggest decisions of the family’s life.
“Amalita was a blessing,’’ Meridith says. “I didn’t know her, but I could feel her energy, and I think Schuyler could too.”
On the flight to Colombia, a near calm had come over Meridith. A deeply spiritual person, she says she reached deep into her soul and found a positivity, a peace, that even she didn’t know was there.
She decided, on the airplane, that Schuyler was going to be all right…and nothing could shake her from that belief.
When Meridith arrived, the doctors showed her the x-rays.
“A whole part of her skull was gone,’’ she says. “They told us for sure she would not see, ever again, no possible way. She would never smell, or taste, if she survived at all.”
By the next morning, on Feb. 20, a CAT scan revealed dramatic improvement. Though in a medically induced coma, Schuyler had already begun the fight.
In the ICU, Meridith told Saya she wished she could play music for Schuyler, because she loved it so much. She fiddled with her cell phone, but there was no Wi-Fi, and she was not receiving service despite her efforts to load Pandora.
She says she placed her phone on top of the paper towel dispenser while she washed her hands, and “all of a sudden Izzy’s ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ comes blasting from my phone.”
Meridith reaches out her arm as she recalls the moment. “Look, my hair still stands on end when I tell this story.”
Somehow, the Pandora app on her phone began playing, even though her phone still had no bars. They gently placed it on Schuyler’s bed and agreed not to touch the phone again. The playlist continued to pipe in tunes. “It proceeded to a playlist that was as if she was having a conversation with us,’’ Meridith said. “It was mind-blowing.”
She wrote down all the songs as they played, and later published them to a “Schuy is the Limit” Facebook page, which Meridith started during her time in Colombia to keep the hundreds of Schuyler’s friends from around the world updated.
The Facebook page proved to be a wonderful source for the family, as prayers and well wishes poured in.
Some wrote that Meridith’s updates were so filled with a positive joy, that it transformed their lives. One mother wrote that her son had been suicidal, but after following the daily posts had told his mother he loved her for the first time in years.
Meridith and Amalita were talking on the phone regularly, about getting Schuyler out of Colombia and to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where they would eventually meet.
The second night in the ICU, before one of her many surgeries early on, the two mothers talked about positive colors, and how they can affect mood. Independently, they had both imagined Schuyler in a room awash with the healing colors of purple and green. “I thought, well, that’s interesting,’’ Meridith said.
The next morning, at 6 a.m., the doctors and nurses show up, wearing purple scrubs. Meridith found the head nurse, and wanted to give her a hug to thank her. The nurse’s name was Violet.
After the surgery, a new nurse had rotated in. Her name was written on the whiteboard in Schuyler’s room — it was Hazel, which is, of course, a shade of green. And, everywhere Meridith looked that day, people seemed to be wearing purple and green.
“There were a lot of things like that happening,’’ she remembers. “Things like that were smattered throughout the whole process.”
Over the next couple of weeks, as Schuyler recovered, there were more miracles.
The girl that was never supposed to be able to smell again complained about a particular aroma from the essential oil that was being diffused near her.
The girl that was never supposed to see again, whose optic nerves had been smashed by a direct hit from a boulder, tapped the correct number of fingers when the doctors asked how many fingers they were holding up.
The room erupted in cheers.
Once they were able to get her back to the U.S., doctors in Miami worked on putting Schuyler back together again. In March, Meridith posted on Facebook:
“Dear sweet Schuy is going to continue her titanium transformation beginning at about 6 am tomorrow morning. She will have a rod placed in her right thigh then screws and wires in her left ankle, shin and knee cap. The miracles of modern science!”
While Schuyler may need an additional surgery to repair her right eyelid later this spring, she has not required any other surgeries, remarkable considering that the boulder had made a direct hit on her head.
Amalita is Catholic, so she has read all about miracles. But, this was the first time, she says, that she had been a part of one.
“I tell everybody that you hear about these many miracles in Biblical times, and about angels and the Pope and so many religious stories, but before my eyes, I can testify that this is a miracle,’’ she says.
She is witness to it every week. She had a pool, so Amalita volunteered to learn aquatherapy. On Thursdays, Meridith drives Schuyler to Tarpon Springs for treatment. Amalita marvels at the progress she gets to see.
“It’s a beautiful, flowing story, and Schuyler is getting better when the odds were that she wasn’t supposed to.”
It has been almost a year since the accident, and the road to recovery is still a long one for Schuyler. But, she isn’t angry, she never asks why this had to happen to her, and she remains undaunted.
“She is championing her way through this,’’ Meridith says. “Neither she nor I have any doubt that within another year, she will be walking.”
The mother has been transformed, too.
Before the accident, things hadn’t been easy for Meridith. There were bad relationships, failed businesses, financial strife.
At times, life had proven difficult.
Before she got off that plane in Colombia, though, everything had come together. She looked at her past, and how it had shaped her for this moment. She was determined to will Schuyler to live, until she could arrive at her side. Once there, in concert with all of the wonderful medical advances employed by the doctors and nurses, she draped her daughter in love, and powered her to recovery, until she could bring her home, and take care of her.
Everything that Schuyler wanted to be before the accident, Meridith will make sure she still becomes.
“I am in awe of the beauty of this mom and her daughter,’’ says Amalita. “What Meridith has done, her positivity, it defies belief. Schuyler would not have survived without her.”
Schuyler has plans to start a travel website, based on the travel blog she kept before the accident. It will highlight user-generated trips made by the more curious travelers, who eschew the typical Top 10 places to visit in a city.
“If you’re ever in Montana, for example, go see the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas,’’ Meridith says.
The website will keep Schuyler engaged, as she is currently brainstorming ideas. “By the time Schuyler is up and running, she’ll be able to use her own passport and will have plenty of ideas for places to visit,’’ Meridith says.
Forrest was one of Schuyler’s closest friends at Yale, and he says he still sees the same joy and enthusiasm in her face he did before the accident. Her says her personality is the same and that he has little doubt that whatever she chooses to do, the best is still ahead for her.
“I don’t see this being a defining story for Schuyler, which is weird to say,” Forrest says. “I honestly think this is something where, she’ll be doing something else amazing and she’ll say, ‘Oh by the way, a couple of years ago I was in this horrible accident, but right now I’m doing this incredible thing.’”
In October, Elkins IronWing, who helped teach Schuyler jazz, ballet, modern and even hip-hop dance (“She loved them all,’’ Meridith says) for more than a dozen years at NTDT, held a large Dance-a-Thon fund raiser for her.
Hundreds showed up, and dozens of local businesses chipped in to pull it off. Dyane was not surprised about the large turnout.
“She was a light that everyone was drawn to,’’ Elkins IronWing says. “I always tell people, if you met her for five minutes, you would remember her for the rest of your life.”
When Dyane saw Schuyler for the first time after the accident, she was overcome with emotion. Her voice chokes up even now recalling the moment, how she so badly just wanted to run to her former pupil and kiss the familiar dimples on her cheeks.
“From the time the accident happened until that moment, she was on the front of my brain,’’ Dyane says. “I just wanted to see her, feel her and kiss her to let her know that everything would be okay.”
The women of Threads of Peru didn’t get the chance to host Schuyler, but her story moved them to make 10,000 of the very same bracelets with the exact pattern Schuyler was wearing that day on the water. She still wears that bracelet today.
Dyane sells them at her dance studio, for $10, with all proceeds going to the cost of Schuyler’s medical care and therapy.
Schuyler has a long way to go to “complete” recovery, or as close as anyone can get to that after a boulder lands on their head. But she’ll get there. She promises.
“I’m just a positive person,” she says.
To follow Schuyler and Meridith on Facebook and learn more about her amazing recovery, search Schuy is the Limit. To purchase a bracelet at the New Tampa Dance Theatre (10701 Cross Creek Blvd), visit Monday-Thursday 4 p.m.-8 p.m., or 9 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturday.
Pasco County Superintendent of Schools Kurt Browning knew heading into a months-long school rezoning process in Wesley Chapel — which was going to move students to the new Cypress Creek Middle/High School on Old Pasco Rd., as well as relieve overcrowding elsewhere — that he was going to be facing some upset parents.
He expected a few emails, some phone calls, maybe even a jeer or two at some of the public meetings. What he didn’t expect, however, was the intensity of the vitriol directed his way. “I think the personal attacks are tough,” Browning says. “I’m a pretty thick-skinned kind of guy, but still, it’s hard to read.”
Browning doesn’t read a lot of the things written about him on Facebook, and when an email turns sour with profanity, he immediately discards it.
“I’m okay with harsh words, I’m okay with tough facts, and people being unhappy with me, I get that,’’ he says. “But when you start using profane language and start personally attacking me based on things that have nothing to do with rezoning, (that’s where I draw the line).”
In the Wesley Chapel process, Browning’s decision to step in and recommend Option 13 over Option 20, which was selected after months of meetings of the School Boundary Committee (SBC) as well as parents, has only intensified the hard feelings towards him.
“I have a hard time with (Option) 20, because it moves more students and it moves them multiple times,’’ Browning said.
How seriously are parents in Wesley Chapel taking the boundary process and Browning’s entry into it?
One emailer wrote, “May God have mercy on your souls.”
“The level to which it has escalated is surprising,’’ Browning says.
On Dec. 20, the School Board tentatively approved Option 13 for the 2017-18 school year, which moves students from Country Walk and parts of Meadow Pointe IV from Dr. John Long Middle School and Wiregrass Ranch High (WRH) to a zone where they will now attend Thomas E. Weightman Middle School and Wesley Chapel High (WCH).
On Tuesday, January 17, the last public hearing will be held at the county School District office before the final vote takes place.
Though once a seemingly smooth process, the shifting opinions and recommendations, as well as the high-running emotions of parents, has thrown it into disarray.
Originally, the School Boundary Committee (SBC) had selected Option 12. That triggered a large protest in the form of a parent’s town hall that drew more than 1,000 Wesley Chapel residents — many of them wearing anti-12 shirts and lobbying hard for Option 20, which rezoned all of Seven Oaks for Weightman and WCH but preserved the current zones for Union Park, Country Walk and Meadow Pointe III & IV.
On Dec. 2, the SBC ditched Option 12 and settled on a final recommendation of Option 20, setting off more fiery responses in Wesley Chapel, as we reported in our Dec. 16 issue.
“That’s when I came in and started looking with the staff at the number of times students would have to move,’’ Browning says, adding that he was concerned that, under Option 20, some students could end up rezoned three different times as the Wesley Chapel area continues to expand.
“That’s when I made the recommendation to the School Board that we go back to the middle ground and Option 13, which keeps Seven Oaks at Wiregrass Ranch,’’ Browning says. “But, the line has to go someplace.”
Browning’s decision to step into the process was met with still more anger from people. Many parents were incensed that after a long process involving a committee of school principals, parents and county administrators, Browning intervened and essentially overruled all of their work.
The Conspiracy Theories
Although they existed before, Browning’s involvement has only heightened the number of conspiracies floating around the boundary process, including one alleging special relationships between Browning and Pasco County commissioner Mike Moore, who lives in Seven Oaks and has children attending Pasco public schools.
“I’ve been accused of all kinds of things,’’ Browning says, adding that he has, “never had a private meeting or a private conversation with anyone from Seven Oaks, or Country Walk, or Union Park, or anywhere else when it comes to rezoning.”
Browning calls Moore a friend, but adds that they don’t socialize. He says he has discussed impact fees with the commissioner, because eventually the decision will come before the BCC, which Moore chairs, but nothing about rezoning.
Moore, whose wife Lauren works at WCH, said that any claims that he interfered with the process are ludicrous. “I have no problem sending my kids to any school in Wesley Chapel,’’ Moore says. “Other than that, I haven’t been involved at all.”
Browning says that he injected himself into the process only after the SBC changed their mind twice. He said he reached out to the District’s director of planning Chris Williams, and asked him to explain why the committee went from Option 12 to 20.
They met, looked over numbers and maps, and Browning says that he felt strongly that Option 13 met more of the goals of drawing new boundaries.
“I knew as soon as I made that decision, that there was going to be a lot of backlash to it,’’ Browning says. “I am very respectful of the committees that do the work for the District…very respectful of that process. But also, there’s a law out there that says the superintendent is responsible for the efficient operation of the school district. Efficiency is everything anymore because of the dollars that we get or don’t get from Tallahassee to operate a district as large as the one we operate.”
That efficiency includes keeping costs down. With the county already strapped for cash, moving school portables, which currently house the overflow of students at many schools, can leave a financial mark.
“Under my recommendation, Option 13, we don’t have to move as many portables as under 20,’’ Browning says. “That’s a huge factor. It costs us $30,000 a portable just to move them.”
Another consideration by Browning was ending the 10-day school periods WRH students have been operating on since 2015.
Option 13, Browning says, eases overcrowding at WRH, which is currently operating at 168 percent capacity, or 1,025 students over it’s original cap of 1,633.
“I will tell you, Wiregrass Ranch is not going to be on a 10-period day next year, or the next year,’’ Browning says. “We’ve got enough students out of Wiregrass Ranch this coming year, a drop of 450-500 kids, to get it off the 10-period day.”
The Impact Fee Solution?
The bigger problem for Browning and students in Wesley Chapel, however, is the rapid growth of the area. Put simply, there are too many students for the number of middle and high schools in Wesley Chapel, so building another one — a new middle school on the current Cypress Creek Middle/High School campus — is paramount.
But , Browning says the funds aren’t there for the likely cost of roughly $70-million. The School Board has decided to ask the Pasco Board of County Commissioners to double the county’s school impact fees, which are charged on newly built homes to pay for new classrooms, from the current $4,800 to $9,174 per single family home.
The impact fee started out as a $1,651 charge in 2001 and has been adjusted twice. It now stands at $4,800 per single-family home, and hasn’t changed since 2008. An attempt to lower that figure in 2011 was defeated by a 3-2 vote by the BCC.
“It needs to double,’’ Browning said, citing a recent study by the county’s consultants. “I’m saying we need the $9,000.”
Browning says there is no capital money to put into new school construction. The Penny for Pasco tax voters approved only allows that money to be spent for technology enhancements, renovations and remodeling. “So, we’re kind of hogtied a little bit,’’ Browning adds.
If doubled, the impact fees could generate another $125 million over the next 10 years for new schools, including the construction of Cypress Creek Middle School. The best-case scenario would mean a new school could be built in four years.
“If we are successful in getting the impact fees increased to the level that will generate enough dollars quickly enough, the first school that we will probably want to look at would be the new Cypress Creek Middle School,’’ Browning says. “And, what that will allow us to do is literally open up 1,000 seats at Cypress Creek Middle/High.”
That would trigger another rezoning, and students living in Seven Oaks would attend the new schools.
“I think Seven Oaks is put on notice that when we open that middle school, they’re going to be rezoned to Cypress Creek,” Browning says.
Rezoning is the nature of the beast in high development areas. Browning hears from a lot of out-of-state transplants who have never been through a rezoning process. He says many of them attended the same schools their parents and grandparents did.
“I tell them that’s because they lived in a neighborhood that was built out or not growing,’’ Browning says. “In Florida, when you look at the vast expanse of space, and Pasco County is right in the crosshairs of development, that’s (not going to happen).”
There are no easy answers, and no way to make everyone happy, Browning says. But the questions — he says he sees those every day as he drives from Meadow Pointe Blvd. to Little Rd. on the other side of the county — in the form of new rooftops.
“I jokingly tell people I drive that stretch of road with my eyes closed, because I don’t want to see all the rooftops, knowing there’s going to be kids under many of those rooftops. My question is, rhetorically, where am I going to put them?”
Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel (FHWC) is virtually ready for another grand opening. Oops. Make that ready for a virtual grand opening.
After drawing an estimated crowd of 8,000 people to its initial Grand Opening in 2012, FHWC is set to unveil its new $78-million, 118,000-sq.-ft. expansion to the general public via social media. FHWC marketing director Tracy Clouser says that because the hospital now has patients being treated everywhere, it isn’t possible to allow thousands to stroll through the corridors, checking out the new rooms and advances in technology.
However, everyone can still attend the Grand Opening of the expansion virtually, via both YouTube and Facebook, on Monday, February 6, 10 a.m.-11 a.m. Clouser says the public will even be given the opportunity to ask questions of FHWC CEO Denyse Bales-Chubb.
“We’ll be showcasing some of the areas people wouldn’t ordinarily get to see,’’ Clouser said during an interview with Neighborhood News editor Gary Nager for the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce Featured Business Segment on WCNT-tv, which hit YouTube on Jan. 6. She added that those who RSVP will get the first look at some of the expansion that is expected to even further enhance the hospital’s standing in the local (see pg 3) and medical community.
FHWC, constructed in the shape of a “W” with North, Center and South wings, is doubling the size of the Center wing, which now has six floors instead of the original three. A three-story connector wing, called the “Southeast Connector,” between the Center and South wings, also is nearly complete.
The extra floors will allow the hospital to expand from 83 private patient rooms to 143.
Emergency room space also is nearly doubling, from 18 rooms to 35. That may be the best news for area residents, as even the influx of urgent care centers in Wesley Chapel and New Tampa hasn’t stopped the FHWC emergency rooms from overflowing some days.
Clouser said there was no true original timetable to expand, but the top brass with FHWC’s parent company, the Adventist Health System originally estimated there would be a need for expansion within 5-7 years when FHWC first opened. But, the unrelenting brisk business at the hospital hastened the need for expansion to within only three years.
“We have been very, very busy,’’ Clouser says. “Obviously, there has been a need in this area for quality healthcare close to home for (local) people.”
Even More Technology
The new patient rooms at FHWC are Cerner Smart Rooms, which offer better workflows for hospital personnel, with instant bedside access to real-time data for doctors, while providing better communication between patients, their providers and visitors.
Visitors will be able to see if the patient is with their doctor, resting or does not want to be disturbed before entering the room, while FHWC staff will know, for example, which of their patients have allergies or are fall risks.
“It’s all right at their fingertips outside the room,’’ Clouser says, adding that the older rooms at FHWC will be retrofitted with the Cerner technology as well.
The new rooms also have the Get Well Network, another technology that bridges the gap between patients and doctors and empowers patients and their caregivers to participate in their healthcare. It also helps track the care patients are receiving — like dosages of medicine or blood tests — while they may be sleeping, right down to knowing when hospital personnel are washing and sanitizing their hands.
Clouser also said that some of the expansion already has been completed. A second heart catheterization lab opened in March, and a new wing with 20 additional beds in the Southeast wing opened in October. That third-floor wing will be an all-women’s wing when all of the other new rooms have opened, all expected by the end of this month or early in February.
The majority of the new rooms and technologies will be on the new fifth and sixth floors. Clouser also said that, for now, the fourth floor will remain as shell space, until future growth dictates adding 24 more patient rooms. Until then, the fourth floor will feature conference and classrooms that will host many of the free community health and wellness programs FHWC currently hosts at the hospital’s adjacent Wellness Center.
Clouser also noted that the expansion, which will be completed by the end of the month or early in February, will attract new physicians offering new procedures, since FHWC will now have more space in the new operating rooms. “That means new treatments, new services and new programs,’’ Clouser says.
Doctors also will soon have access to the MAKO platform, which is a robotic-arm-assisted system that can perform orthopaedic surgeries like partial knee or hip replacements. FHWC also has the daVinci System, another robotic-assisted device that specializes in minimally invasive surgery, such as removing a gall bladder or performing a hysterectomy through a patient’s belly button.
“We are the only site in Pasco County able to do that,’’ Clouser said “Surgeons like it because it’s minimally invasive, there’s less scarring, less pain, shorter recovery times and less blood.”
FHWC also will feature a tech room that allows doctors to enter via keyboard the patient’s name and type of surgery being performed, prompting a shelf to open up that provides all of the tools needed to perform that particular operation.
To RSVP for the virtual FHWC expansion Grand Opening, please visit FHInspiredByYou.com. The event will be on YouTube and Facebook, on Mon., Feb. 6, 10 a.m.-11 a.m. Check out the drone footage and much more inside FHWC from Brad Hall Studios on Episode 14 of WCNT-tv on YouTube now!
In our 2016 Reader Dining Survey & Contest, more than 500 readers submitted surveys ranking their favorite restaurants in Wesley Chapel and New Tampa, category by category.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out an entry form. Look for my restaurant favorites in our next issue and for some of these listings to appear on future episodes of WCNT-tv.
Your Favorite Japanese/Sushi Restaurants In NT & WC
Kobe Japanese Steak House is No. 1 in New Tampa and Wesley Chapel.
1. Kobe Japanese Steakhouse
2. Yamato Japanese Steakhouse
3. Bonsai Sushi
4. Koizi Endless Hibachi & Sushi
5. Sushi Café
6. Hibachi Express
7. Sukhothai
8. Asian Buffet
9. Ginza Endless Sushi
10. Fong’s Sushi (formerly Sushi Raw)
*-Takara Sushi & sake finished 8th, but has since gone out of business
