here is my current draft any and all comments apprciated (outside of typos I am typing one handed) as the people who need to approve my release don't work weekends, Still not 24 hours since PEG so they refuse to use it except to drain my stomach. At least my ENT showed up and over rode everone to issue immediate orders to start an IV drip of water and potassium, but it's a close race as it goes in the IV and out the PEG which is connected to a urine drainage bag
See i was right a PEG is a big deal

Dear Head of Georgetown Hospital

On Ash Wednesday, 2009, I was admitted to Georgetown University for extensive surgery to address the recurrence of Stage IV Base of Tongue Cancer SCC that had spread to the left side cervical lymph nodes that recurred after 3 months of radiation and chemo, also done at Georgetown in 2007.

First let me say the technical expertise of every Georgetown staff person from nurse, medical student, resident, and operating doctors was excellent. However, the lack of any administrative coherence or cross-assigned responsibility, and no method or applied system of accountability, meant that I endured both major and petty failures in quality health care and suffered needlessly for 13 days and night.

I need your help to make sure that the good intentions of your staff are actually transmuted into satisfactory actions. I know you are far too busy to personally address my concerns, but if you would require the Head of nursing and the Head of Intervential Radiological Surgery to meet with me, I believe collabaratively we could remedy these failings fairly easily, with nothing more complicated than creating a protocol "checklist" such as the one that has reduced hospital infections and garnered such press acclaim.

I have already found that writing to a department head last year resolved serious concerns about PET scans and substancially improved the caliber of that Georgetown service. In this new situation, since cross functional action is needed, only you can make the Georgetown credo of excellence more than empty rhetoric.

I drafted and discarded multiple angry accusatory diatribes, that while cathartic, would not spare any future patient my suffering and indignities. The issues I wish to address range from life threatening to absurd.

Despite pleas for help which were ignored, I went without any water, any IV nutrition, or fluids of any kind for 42 hours. I wasting away from 137 to 124 (a 13 pound drop of almost 10% of my overall body weight). By any standards this is unacceptable. No one ever weighed me, (baseline or during my stay) despite every hospital bed having a working scale.

On the absurd side: Ask yourself if your standard of care includes leaving a patient sit in a freezing hospital basement next to the trash, ignored for an hour and half, while watching surgeons fold trash boxes? (even when that patient gamely tries to get acknowledgment by singing? Did the person who left the patient there ever return? No he never returned.

I am sincere in my wish to work constructively. As a fellow Catholic, I call upon you to help me avoid falling into despair over enduring these kinds of substandard treatment, by working to fix such issues. I never thought that checking into a Catholic hospital like Georgetown would be a major occasion of sin, requiring confession of anger and harsh words. I would like to help see that this does not happen to any other patient.

Looking forward to your positive response.