Consumer Watchdog
Patient Voices by District
These families’ stories of harm in the health care system inspire Consumer Watchdog’s work to improve patient safety, help injured patients get justice and hold those who commit medical malpractice accountable.
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Shilpa Airy
Shilpa Airy was an entrepreneur and research scientist who ran a successful biotech consulting business in San Francisco. She worked with many of the top...
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Lloyd Monserratt
Lloyd Monserratt was a UCLA grad, a rising star in California politics, a Latino Vote Director for the DCCC, a Director at NALEO, a Chief...
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Nikoo Alice Izadseta
Dylan Izadseta fought tirelessly to welcome a second child into her family. She pursued IVF treatments, which ultimately were successful. At the age of 39, she was...
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Alex Smick
Alex Smick had a wonderful life mapped out for himself. At 20, he was studying to be a surgical technician. He was athletic, played a...
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Demi Dominguez
Demi Dominguez was just about to graduate from Cal State Bakersfield with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Her plan was to go to graduate school...
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Sabrina De La Rosa
Sabrina De la Rosa was a woman who understood her worth. Her mother, Monica, recalls her leaving a job and saying “they just don’t know...
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Jose Ibarra
Jose Ibarra was fortunate to be surrounded by family that loved him. He had a different life than most young men his age due to...
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Kimberly Turbin
With regular prenatal visits and no morning sickness, weight gain, or complications, Kimberly had no reason to expect any issues during the delivery of her...
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Richard Johnson
Richard Johnson was a natural with computers. At 23, he was a talented software specialist and planned to relocate to Texas to move up in...
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Steven Olsen
It was the kind of accident that could happen to any child at anytime. Like many two year olds, Steven Olsen loved climbing, running and...
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Celeste
Celeste Miranda Ortiz had a dream to open her own hair salon. Growing up with her grandparents and watching them build their business, Celeste’s dream...
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Malakhi De Leon
Demi Dominguez and Xavier De Leon were engaged and enjoying their lives when a little surprise came: Demi announced that she was pregnant. Xavier was...
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Annette Ramirez
As she walked into the hospital on August 1, 2012, Annette Ramirez was nervous. At age 48, she was about to have the first surgery...
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Suzan Shinazy
Suzan was a registered nurse working at a small hospital in Fresno. After a violent altercation with a patient going through drug withdrawals, she suffered...
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Jordan Perez
Jordan Perez’s love for softball began at four years old. She played for Riverside Girls Softball Association where she was a two-time All Star. She...
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Tina Minasian
Tina Minasian was a dedicated real estate agent in the Roseville and Sacramento area—a job she loved because it allowed her to help others. Known...
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Jose Figueroa Jr.
Jose Figueroa Jr. was the youngest of three children. His big sisters adored him. He loved to go with his parents and sisters to the...
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Mike Bradley
Mike and Carol Bradley were happily married for 46 years. At age 72, Mike was still working full time as a car salesman. He was...
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Justin Zetino
Justin Zetino was truly passionate about music. He had a deep admiration for the band Mana and held a special place in his heart for...
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Lena Wilson
At 87 years old, Lena Wilson lived a vibrant life. She went on walks with her son Mark every day, often stopping at the local...
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Mario Guzman
Mario Guzman was a very successful design engineer by day. He designed hardware for semiconductors. He earned his Master of Science degree in Computer Engineering...
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Don Stegman
After forty years of marriage, Don and Jill Stegman had it all—two beautiful children, a stable relationship, fulfilling careers. But a blood cancer led Don...
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Rowan Gibbs
Rowan Gibbs had a smile that would light up a room. He was a happy child with a heart filled with love for his family,...
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Anayeli Alvarez
Selena Alvarez graduated from high school in 2013. She was working and had just started attending college when she found out that she was pregnant....
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Patty Plascencia
Patty Plascencia is a business owner in Chula Vista and has been a leading real estate professional for the past 20 years. She is a mother...
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James Taylor Sr.
James Taylor Sr. dedicated his career to working as a machine operator before enjoying a well-earned retirement. He was a vibrant force in both his...
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Lorraine Cano
Lorraine Cano was living a joyful life as a vibrant senior. She devotedly walked her two little chihuahuas at the park every day. She enjoyed...
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Anthony Torres
Anthony Torres was looking forward to his daughter’s upcoming wedding, and was getting in the best shape of his life as he was preparing to...
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Laylianna Medina
Susanna Talamantes had a history of pregnancy complications. With her first pregnancy, she suffered from hypertension and gestational diabetes. With her second pregnancy, she was rushed to...
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Nina Hebert
Nina Hebert leads a busy career in addition to raising her three children. The Air Force recently relocated her family to California. She lives with...
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Danny Bazan
Danny Bazan is a vibrant soul, full of life and energy, who cherished every moment spent with his family. He relished the thrill of riding...
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Debra Watkins
Debra Watkins specializes in communications. She believes in helping others and has devoted herself to building coalitions to help the homeless and veterans. When her...
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Troy and Alana Pack
It could have been a Norman Rockwell scene. Troy and Alana Pack, ages 10 and 7 were walking with their mom and two other neighborhood...
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Holly Harris
Holly Harris enjoyed a career in social services and healthcare as a staff trainer for a child abuse prevention agency in San Diego. She had...
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Leah Coufal
She would be an adult now if not for medical negligence. Back in the winter of 2002, Leah Coufal was the love of her family....
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Kira Johnson
39-year-old Kira Johnson was a remarkable person. She could speak five languages, had raced cars, possessed a pilot’s license and even skydived as a hobby....
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Jennifer Ha
Jennifer Ha was a Vietnamese refugee and the matriarch of her thirteen-person household. She had orchestrated her family’s escape from Vietnam. At 38, she ran...
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Charles Senior
Charles Senior moved to California with a music career in mind. He started working at Sony as a supervisor in private security with the intention of...
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Shawn Washington
Shawn Washington II was a mentor to his siblings and summer campers, a talented photographer and musician, and an expecting father. He lived with his...
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Mia Moreno
On February 2, 2014, Bree and Nelson Moreno were thrilled to welcome their baby girl Mia into the world. It had been a good pregnancy...
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Mia Chavez
Alejandra Gonzalez took her six-week old infant, Mia, to medical providers four times in eight days. A mother of three, Alejandra knew when one of...
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Adam Glover
Adam’s parents finally did find one very good lawyer willing to take the case, if only out of sympathy and outrage. But as they moved...
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Alicia Cole
Alicia Cole was a successful actress in Los Angeles for decades. An LA native, she had spent many years working in the entertainment industry and...
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Angel Villalobos
Angel Villalobos was born with just one heart ventricle instead of two. A series of operations early in life should have fixed the problem and...
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Angelica Chisolm
Angelica lived in service of others. Before her health began to deteriorate, she was a job coach for people with disabilities. Before that, she was...
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Anthony Fossett
Anthony Fossett was a young aspiring musician and a beloved member of his community. An alumnus of Youth Radio’s Core and Bridge program, Anthony wanted...
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Aspen Adams
Aspen Adams was a happy, healthy, energetic baby. But when she was 21 months old, her mother Leah discovered a lump on her belly. She...
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Bill Mitchell
Bill Mitchell, a former San Diego City Council member and deputy mayor, is a sophisticated man who thought he knew how to read people. But...
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Bobbie Jenke
Five years ago, Bobbie Jenke was full of life, an active Santa Rosa special education teacher who regularly went to her students’ homes, and on...
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Brittany Wilkinson
Around the Fresno area, she was something of a minor celebrity, a buoyant teen beating the odds against a rare illness. Brittany Wilkinson pushed hard...
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Charles Blevins
Charles Blevins had arthroscopic knee surgery at an outpatient surgical center. Three days later, he went to an emergency room with a fever and severe...
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Coletta Preacely-Garcia
Coletta was a sixth grade teacher and a track coach. She had recently received a degree in film and media arts. Her family and friends...
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Cynthia
Cynthia is a Forensic Mental Health Clinician. She works in the mental health field. She goes into the state hospitals and assesses the mental health...
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Dana Stinson
At the peak of her nursing career, Dana Stinson was permanently disabled by a disastrous surgery and the doctor’s subsequent attempt to cover up her...
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Daniela Zelig
When Daniela was diagnosed with the flu at an urgent care appointment in a trusted Kaiser hospital, her parents could never have imagined that an...
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Daphne McClendon-Ricks
Around their Fresno neighborhood, Daphne McClendon-Ricks was known to all the kids simply as “Mom.” She was the shoulder to lean on, the unbreakable woman...
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Diane Stewart
In 2007, Diane Stewart received two knee replacements because of injuries she sustained in a car crash when she was younger. After the operation, she...
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Doug Shulby
He was a father of two with a new RN certification. But without warning, Doug Shelby found himself in a medical emergency. Late one night in...
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Elizabeth Brown
Elizabeth Brown was not a typical teenager. An exceptional student, she left home at fifteen to start college early. She made the dean’s list and even earned an opportunity to study abroad at Oxford University. She was also a talented musician. She...
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Elizabeth Nicks
Elizabeth Nicks was a 12-year-old cheerleader. One day, during an aerial move, she fell to the ground when her fellow cheerleaders lost their grip. A...
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Gary Rushford
The pain began in Gary Rushford’s foot and slowly slithered up to his heel, then his calf and then his thigh. It moved with all...
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Harry Jordan
As told by Harry Jordan:I was brought into surgery at Long Beach Hospital (where I was a Board Trustee) in late 1982 when x-rays revealed...
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Janet Garner
Janet Garner’s routine spleen removal surgery was completed without incident. After recovery, she left the hospital relieved, thinking that her medical woes had been taken care of....
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Jessie Geyer
A few days before Halloween, 7-year-old Jessie Geyer began to feel lousy. She had a high fever and severe leg pain. It was bad enough...
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Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a U.S. Army veteran who proudly served our country as a Specialist/Combat Engineer in the Kosovo conflict. In civilian terms, Joe blew...
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John Enzenauer
Just before Christmas two years ago, John Enzenauer, 39, came home from his blue-collar job feeling lousy. He didn’t worry much about it: Just a...
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John Ritchie
Although he was a gifted athlete who excelled at basketball, John Ritchie suffered from a heart condition for over a decade. Midway through his thirties,...
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Katy Williams
Katy Williams had just turned nineteen and was about to graduate from high school. She was looking forward to college in the fall and dreamed...
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Kay Marchioni
In July of 2000, Kay Marchioni, a second grade and pre-school teacher in Chicago, beat cancer at the age of 56. She decided to do something...
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Kenneth Evan Kennedy
Evan Kennedy, his father says, was not a foolhardy man. He knew he had an inherited heart problem, so when he decided to train for...
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Kim Goodson
Due to a health care change by her employer, Anh Kim Goodson was forced into the Kaiser Permanente system on December 1, 2011. She continued for...
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Lehna Brewer
Beth Stover, 40, was past her due date when she went in for a stress test to determine whether to induce labor. A technician noticed...
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Malyia Jeffers
Two-year-old Malyia Jeffers had an ever-rising fever and unexpected bruising around her cheeks. Her parents rushed her to a Sacramento emergency room, where they waited for hours...
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Mara Douglas
Mara Douglas was a devout Catholic, admired in her community for her selflessness and generosity of spirit. After raising three children of her own, she...
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Misty Parker
Misty Parker is a nurse and an educator. Misty led a very active, normal life. She lifted weights and took care of herself because she...
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Morgan Westhoff
Morgan Westhoff and her identical twin sister were each born with a common congenital heart defect. At 18 months old, Morgan’s twin had a successful...
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Naya Manalo
Jamie Maraviglia’s pregnancy and delivery with her daughter Naya was fairly routine and uneventful. After Naya’s birth, Jamie and her husband Dan were excited to...
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Nora Bostrom
Nora Bostrom had pulmonary hypertension that required her to use oxygen and take intravenous medications. Despite these challenges, she had a high quality of life....
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Olivia Cull
Olivia Cull was born with a condition in which one side of her heart was smaller than the other. As an infant, she had surgery...
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Patricia Roland
In October 2009, Patricia Roland of Thousand Oaks underwent heart surgery at age 57 to replace her mitral valve, which helps regulate the flow of...
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Paul Ethier
He was a surfer, doing what he loved best: riding the California waves. The swell was up one day in 2004 off Half Moon Bay,...
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Pauline Tavares
Pauline Tavares, 79, was admitted to a hospital with encephalitis and was given medication to control her anxiety. The next morning, a nurse fed Pauline,...
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Quin Murphy
Quin Murphy, 16, was a soccer fanatic with a family who supported him, coached him, and even went on trips with him to watch his favorite teams....
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Rabbi Aaron Gottesman
He was the one who consoled countless victims of crime and disaster, a fire and police chaplain well known in San Diego. Even after a...
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Raymond Williams
As told by his wife, Jackie Williams:My spouse Raymond Williams passed at (Sacramento) Mercy Hospital in January 1994. He had been prescribed the wrong medicine...
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Robert Downey
Robert Downey worked alongside his wife at the elder care business they ran together. He was honorably discharged from the army after serving six years...
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Robyn Frankel
After talking to a neurosurgeon about her history of migraine headaches, Robyn Frankel was told to undergo an invasive cerebral angiogram. This would require the injection...
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Ruth MacInnes
HMO doctors, paid through Medicare, failed to provide medical tests to diagnose and treat heart disease in my mother over a two year period. The...
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Sally Hunter
Sally Hunter was a homemaker in Pasadena, California, happily married to her loving husband Harold Hunter. But everything changed when Sally’s colon cancer was discovered....
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Shanna Alvarado
A nagging pain in her abdomen sent Shanna Alvarado to a Kaiser hospital in Southern California in October 2010. An ultrasound showed the origins of...
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Shawn Rial
Shawn Rial had testicular cancer, the most treatable form of cancer, and a projected 90 percent chance of success through chemotherapy. That’s why his family...
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Shelly Gerrans
Shelly Gerrans was a homemaker, a loving wife, and a caring mother to three young children. When she needed a hysterectomy, she and her husband...
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Stephen Schaak
Stephen Schaak, an otherwise healthy 51-year-old merchant marine, husband and father of three sons, went to the emergency room exhibiting clear signs of a pulmonary...
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Tamara Walter
Tamara Walter underwent a successful lap-band surgery at an outpatient surgery center, but her recovery was another story. Five hours after Tamara’s surgery, her sister...
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Theresa Ginn
Theresa Ginn’s greatest joy was being a mother. She only had one child and they were best friends. She and her daughter Ashley traveled together,...
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Tom McLennan
In 2009, during his sophomore year of junior college, Tom McLennan fractured his big toe in a kickboxing accident. Usually, big-toe fractures get a cast...
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Zachary Diecker
Doctors expected a smooth delivery of Zachary Diecker. But a series of medical errors driven by negligence, lack of oversight, and incompetence would end his life...
