“She’s helped me a lot with various
cancer procedures over the years and
she’s fun—very upbeat,” says Dr. Laura
King about Dr. Fulwider, who she’s
collaborated with for more than twentyfive years. Laura King and Cole
Fulwider first met in 1978, while doing
their combination residency at the
University of California, Irvine School of
Medicine and the Long Beach Veterans
Administration Hospital.
While Dr. Fulwider’s main practice is in
Huntington Beach, she’s been helping
out in Los Alamitos for many years,
where Laura King, M.D., and Tina Miley,
R.N., primarily work.
“She’s very caring” and has a “really
good heart,” added Laura King, M.D., to
describe her colleague. Rhetorically, Dr.
King asked, “You know what’s special
about her, she’s an excellent surgeon—
excellent surgeon!”
It’s a Fulwider Day
“She’s very direct, she’s very fair—you
know what you’re getting,” said Tina
Miley, R.N., about the unsuspectingly
infectious Cole Fulwider. “Everybody at
work loves it when it’s a Fulwider day,”
which is usually on Wednesday, Miley
added. “We call it that, ‘A Fulwider
Day,’” says the nurse, exuberantly.
“I always tell people, she’s not a warmfuzzy—but she’s got such a heart for her
patients,” laments Tina Miley, about the
physician she also describes as fearless.
“You want to trust her and her patients
do trust her, I think,” said Miley, who
can intuitively sense when Dr. Fulwider
has been surfing before work—“it’s in
her eyes, that peaceful happiness that
she gets.”
Wanting to confirm a few background
facts as I looked over my notes, I
reached out to Cole by text, who
promptly responded from Rincon Point
in Santa Barbara County—a famous surf
spot off the 101 near La Conchita. You
won’t find a souvenir shop or hamburger
stands surfing Rincon Point—it’s as
authentic as surfing gets here in
California or on the mainland for that
matter. Cole mentioned seeing 11-time
world surfing champion Kelly Slater
while surfing Rincon Point, which most
certainly is not a place for novice surfing.