"Did you read your stories?" she asked a reporter. "Would you let [them] touch you?"
Scull's husband called Kaiser this week to check on his wife's case. On Friday, a Kaiser transplant official called Celia Scull to reassure her, urging her to "calm down," she said.
Judi Franich had never been comfortable with the idea of letting the new Kaiser center handle her transplant. Now she feels vindicated -- though it gets her nowhere.
She had her first kidney transplanted at UC San Francisco in 1995. When that one failed in 2004, she signed on at the university medical center to wait for another cadaver kidney.
Later that year, when Kaiser said she needed to transfer to its new program, Franich refused. She'd grown close to her doctors at UC San Francisco.
Kaiser officials told her that she could stay wherever she wanted but that they wouldn't pay. She is still officially on the waiting list at UC San Francisco, while she considers her options.
A little more than a month ago, Kaiser transplant surgeon Hootan Roozrokh sent Franich a letter saying she could file a grievance if she wanted to.
"I am assuming you will change carriers based on our conversation, so I will close your chart in the transplant offices," he wrote.
His letter concluded: "Good luck at getting a kidney!"
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\o7Tracy Weber may be contacted at tracy.weber@latimes.com and Charles Ornstein at charles.ornstein@latimes.com.
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