Patient Experience: Eight Months of Care Leaves Memories for a Lifetime

Each day, UCLA Hospital System employees play a part in the drama of caring for and saving human lives. Directly or indirectly, each of us — regardless of duties or title — contribute to the overall “patient experience.” Patients assume UCLA’s medical excellence, but it is the unexpected acts of kindness or gestures of genuine care that are often most remembered. Occasionally, Employee News will highlight a patient experience as a tribute to the expertise and compassion of UCLA employees.

On August 16, 2004, upon waking up with back pain, Esteban Faure, a former professional soccer player from Argentina and now owner of a courier service often used by UCLA, radioed his employees to say that he was running late and would join them after getting his back examined. Little did he know that after driving himself to Sherman Oaks Hospital, he would wake up three months later to find himself in UCLA Medical Center’s intensive care unit (ICU).

After a week without improvement, Cindy Faure wanted her husband admitted to UCLA. She contacted family friend Sheldon Schwartz, an administrative specialist at UCLA’s Digestive Diseases Department, who made a few phone calls resulting in Esteban’s speedy transfer
to UCLA. During his first night, his heart stopped twice but was revived by the “help of the wonderful Dr. Saleh Saleh,” who Esteban credits with saving his life.

Esteban Faure, months after his successful recovery, visits Dr. Henry Cryer, trauma surgeon. Dr. Cryer was one of several UCLA physicians who saved Esteban’s life.

Diagnosed with acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis — an often difficult to treat and fatal condition — Esteban spent the next eight months as an inpatient, transferring in and out of UCLA’s various ICUs, such as 4 West, 5 East, 7 East, 9 East and the basement ICU, as he endured over 10 surgeries — including heart and abdomen — acute respiratory distress, kidney failure, intestinal infections, extended periods on a ventilator, and losing 20 units of blood. Finally, he was released on April 22, 2005, for home health and outpatient physical and occupational therapy.

Aside from the extraordinary expertise of his physicians, Drs. Henry Cryer, Areti Tillou, Saleh Saleh and Ruth Winst, “It is the nurses that truly touch my heart,” Esteban recalls. “One day, I knew I was about to die until I heard a voice in the background, calling out ‘you’re sick Esteban, but we’re going to help you!’ That voice brought me back, and to this day, I don’t know whose voice it was, but it inspired me to hang on.”

Able to recall only the first names of some of the nurses who cared for him, Esteban fondly remembers nurses Vicky and Romey who stayed with him all night tending to the complications after his first surgery; nurse Alicia Organista who brought him flowers; and another nurse who surprised him with a Valentine’s Day card, chocolates and candies for him to give to his wife and son. While helping Esteban write a message on the card, he asked her why she was doing this and she replied, “This is what we do.” “This is what we do,” he reiterates, holding back tears.

“I remember when another nurse introduced me to a patient who had fully recovered from a worse case of pancreatitis than mine, just to prove to me that I was going to survive, too,” he continues. “And, I can’t forget nurse ‘Melanie’ who authorized my young son, Jesse, to visit, and cried when she heard him tell me, ‘Dad, don’t give up.”

Most important to Esteban however, was how well everyone treated his mother who had traveled from Argentina to be by his bedside. “They were wonderful, they treated her truly like a queen, always finding someone to answer all her questions in Spanish and making sure she was okay.”

“It is truly a miracle that I am alive, and it is because of all the wonderful people at UCLA who helped me to live. Without UCLA, I know I would have died,” Esteban says.