Vicki Padilla in Adult and Family Medicine is deserving of a DAISY Award. She actually is deserving of much more than this given the climate of our world. I am a transgender male and I am on the tail end of a very long healing process of my final gender reassignment surgeries. Last year after my RFF Phalloplasty, I was met with an unexpected challenge, my after care. I was met with an unwillingness to step out of the box and figure out how to care for my surgery sites. Thankfully my general practitioner and her nurse, Vicky Padilla, were my champions. To put it mildly, my arm (my donor site) was a wreck. I was exhausted, in pain, lost and scared. Vicky stepped up and took care of me. Without hesitation, she devised a wound care procedure that quite frankly is the reason I have such success with my skin graft. She washed and changed my bandages almost daily for a few weeks and even let me know if she was going to be in a different office for the day, in case I needed her. But really, it had less to do with the care and more to do with her acceptance and encouragement. Mine is a vulnerable position to be in when there is so much hate in the world. You never really know how someone will react. Vicky treated me with kindness and dignity. She expressed a genuine concern for my health and encouraged me to be my authentic self. She never once discriminated towards me and in fact was genuinely interested in my life and the process of gender reassignment. Always appropriate and respectful and loving. A true caretaker.
I run into her periodically while I'm on the main Kaiser campus and she always greets me, asks me how I'm doing and wishes me well. That goes a long way in this climate of intolerance. She is a true caregiver in every sense of the word. I will never forget her kindness and dedication to my care.