So you can tell UCSF is right in San Francisco. Back to the hospital to deal w/more doctor negilgence. I'll add more tonight.

SATURDAY NIGHT:
He's in a room in the medicine dept floor. The admitting doctor (who looked younger than ME!) was a very good listener and wrote down everything we said and passed it along to the medicine team and the plastics team. This is so rare! PPl usu just humor you. One good thing about it being a younger person, sometimes they don't write you off. More often young women over young men. Anyway, she was very good at even trying to come to some understanding of this whole ordeal with both the wounds and the 3 diff hospitals, diff plastics surgeons, everything we've been dealing with all year. It has been almost exactly a yr since he went in the hospital for the first pressure sore.

We think maybe they are listening better this time around partly because by now WE know so much about pressure sores and how this has developed that they recognize things thru hearing our experience. We can tell them what hasn't worked and what has worked somewhat. We know the names for things and a little about the process of skin breakdown. What it does the rest of the body (the smell change, the fevers). Plus, I have the pictures to prove what we've seen. Can't argue with that! The admitting doctor and the resident in the medicine dept both agreed the change since he saw Dr Ting was drastic and severe. And that we haven't ever received proper communication btwn diff depts. Namely plastics and everyone else. At ANY of the hospitals we've been to. Plastics are in their own world. They don't understand prevention of wounds they just focus on when it's time for surgery. But they won't express to us how to get to that point effectively! I think it's partly cuz they don't KNOW enough about pre-surgery issues. I mean they'll say it's not their specialty. They tell us to go see a specialist in that area but then say their word is ultimate and no one else matters in the procedure but them!! This was particularly the first plastic surgeon at John Muir, "Bob"...

As I've mentioned before they also just don't know how to deal w/someone as young as he is with this problem. They aren't thinking about how to deal with it permanently so a person can live for many more years. All they've ever thought about is helping prolong a life for a couple yrs or making someone comfortable at the end of their life with a pressure sore. Can you imagine how crappy that makes someone who is 29 feel about themself? In his words, "it makes him feel like an old coot". Someone who isn't worth making a priority because pressure sores "always mean a downward spiral." That's enough to make anyone feel fatalistic about their situation. How bout working to prevent that from being true? Plastics aren't flexible, they aren't open to new ideas or diff ones for diff cases. And the first sore healed differently than the second due largely to less natural tissue in the area of the second one. So a different strategy is in order...We will NOT be using Dr Ting, the plastic surgeon he was assigned to at UCSF. She did a terrible dressing at his appt on Thurs that caused dead tissue to develop, stench and the fever. All in 24 hrs. I have those pictures to prove it...Anyway, it's still a very serious situation so keep him in your thoughts. I'll keep this updated.