7/28/26

Going back to the Home page where I call out CNO Sober and her predecessor, Terrell Lowe.

I arrived as a traveling RN and agreed to full-time employment at CHOMP with the written contract of ½ my hourly rate to take emergency call. Standard Benchmark for hospitals throughout the Bay Area. Less than one week after signing on the dotted line, a unilateral decision was made by Administration to withhold call pay after 11pm, falsely claiming they no longer had to compensate us for being on call, but that we are still required to respond. If we refused, we would be accused of patient abandonment and risk our license. Sober even gave me the, “You don’t sound as if you like your job, Ken,” threat when I raised the legality of such a shady move. Remember, just uprooted my entire world. This was definetely illegal but what was I gonna do?

Fast forward 12 years, through the “kindness of their hearts,” we now receive ¼ our hourly rate to be on call for emergencies. For me, the math comes out to $50k x 12 = $600,000 in stolen pay!!! Roughly what Sober has pocketed in Bonus Money ALONE!!!!

Oh yeah, the annual Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for CHOMP/Montage RN’s in April 2026 was a meager 2% increase! And this is how you treat your nurses????

7/23/2026

This is where I thought I would get the stories out. Not just my stories but yours. But let me make one thing clear before I get started…this site is as much yours as it is mine. This entire movement was started because of someone else. Actually, a couple of someones. Good people that were done wrong by the Ivory Tower and discarded like used toilet paper. People that were trying to do the right thing and got persecuted for it. If I’m not mistaken, I believe it’s in the Montage mission statement…”And no good deed shall go unpunished.” So it’s important that this is “Our Story,” a story about a community hospital that seems to be for everything BUT the community it serves. A hospital that, by all accounts, has lost it’s way. Since I first launched this project a week ago, the tales have been coming in. And not just stories from my coworkers saying, “Remember when so and so was fired for x, y and z?” No, but from patients and their families. For instance, I ran into an old gym rat buddy at The Crossroads today, Dave and his lovely wife. After a brief catch-up, he tells me his Montage debacle. What first starts out as a complaint about questionable billing practices, turns into a nightmare post-op infected shoulder surgery story. After hearing what happened, with the re-operation to replace his brand new shoulder and the two dozen hospitalizations afterward to fight the staph he caught from a dirty instrument tray, my blood is still boiling. It’s not just the instruments with dried tissue on them, it’s the way he was treated afterward that really makes me question our leadership.

I’ve recently taken on this challenge and have been asked a few times, “What’s your writing style?” Huh…? Did you not just read the front page…? I’m a nurse, not a writer. But if sarcasm is a style, then there it is.

As I alluded to, there will be no shortage of stories. But the first one is the freshest, as it occurred just this week. The much beloved and respected Director of Main Pavilion, a 34 year employee, was, for all intents and purposes, fired to make room in the budget. The newly launched Care Navigation Hub, designed to help us move from a reactive, knee jerk style, to a more proactive, coordinated and streamlined approach to patient care, was being implemented. She was given the ultimatum to take a demotion with a substantial cut in pay, resign, or be fired. 34 years of blood, sweat and tears gone. That is how this place treats its most tenured and valued employees, like yesterday’s garbage. No warning or heads up to her staff. No email beforehand explaining what to expect and certainly no apologies. She and her staff were devastated, as evidenced by the tears and the heaviness of the whole situation. A poor way to build morale in a time when morale is already in the gutter. They even neglected to alert the other Directors of the downsizing plan in order for them to prepare for the onslaught of questions. In typical CHOMP fashion always in damage control, yesterday Sober sent all affected employees an “Important Announcement,” attempting to justify what many have described as, “a callous act.” I ask you, what kind of place does that to their long time employees? It is widely known that Main Pavilion is old and in poor shape, with many of it’s critical components such as suction, oxygen and electrical outlets in desperate need of updating. It is entirely possible she was blackballed because of her patient advocacy approach, but we will never know. She was replaced by Eddie Trisler, Director of the critical care service line, to now include ICU, Main Pavilion, Garden East, Garden West and Dialysis Unit. FYI, that’s a lot of staff for one person to manage. But rest assured, nobody in the Ivory Tower lost any sleep over this, as this has been the norm for decades. Wrongful termination is a term you will hear over and over when discussing CHOMP/Montage and unfortunately, this won’t be the last on this blog.

I believe CHOMP/Montage operates behind the “Truth Effect,” essentially repeating lies and misinformation, which “conditions the listener’s mind and leads to the psychological tendency to believe false information is true simply because you have been repeatedly exposed to it.” Sound familiar??

Since we’re on the topic of Main Pavilion, I thought I’d keep it here. Whistleblower. Can have many connotations, right? But usually done with best intentions as is evidenced in my next presentation. I have known this particular nurse by way of most of my connections here, through our patients. By virtue of dropping you off or handing you over, however you prefer, I’ve come to know some amazing people. This one in particular was also Wrongfully Terminated because she was doing her job, protecting you. The irony is the above not named, recent Wrongfully Terminated Director herself, was responsible for carrying out Sober’s dirty work. As patient safety after patient safety report went typically ignored, this long term CHOMP RN was quietly being targeted. A nurse who “cut her chops” here and was recruited by me personally to work in Cath Lab (her mom was a CCL RN too) slowly saw her annual performance evaluations take a hit. They were building their case to dispose of another troublemaker by way of lies and coercion. “Your coworkers find you difficult to deal with. You clocked in a minute too early. A minute too late. Why do you have overtime? Just sign here.” Any lesser of a person would’ve crumbled. Her life is still shattered thanks to the soulless Ivory Tower, but she will survive. Even thrive, like so many of those that fell before or after her doing the right thing. And she is just one of many, many stories just like hers. Something has to be done with the way they bully, intimidate and wreck the lives that choose to stand up for what they believe in. Someone has to stand up and that someone is me!

Breaktime….