Meet the Unsung Heroes Making San Diego Hospitals Feel Like Home

Doctors are rightfully the faces of San Diego’s medical world, having spent sleepless years in residencies, mastering the art of reading X-rays, and turning their surgical hands into supernaturally precise instruments. But ask an MD—or anyone who has spent even a couple minutes in a hospital—and they’ll point to support staff or volunteers who’ve shown up for decades. Like the woman who bakes cookies for patients. The nurse who strums a ukulele to lift spirits. Or the case manager who makes a hospital stay feel like visiting family.

While top doctors are laser-focused on execution, these crews tend to the untold amount of crucial and optional details that add a little warmth. So for this year’s Top Doctors issue, we asked local hospitals to name those people.

The Filipino Elvis

In the recovery units at UC San Diego Health, the air can run tight with fear. But nurse Rod Salaysay uses his ukulele to ease the room during trying moments.

It started two decades ago, when a patient’s family gave him a ukulele. He taught himself to play, and later brought it to recovery units. For religious patients facing cancer, he’ll pull out worship songs. For someone taking their first steps after surgery, he’ll play a Hawaiian tune so they can sway their hips like a hula dancer. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is his crowd-pleaser, hums included. A patient once said he sounded like “the Filipino Elvis.” He has also written original songs, like “Miracles” and “You’ll Make It Back,” born from bedside moments.

The music does more than fill silence. It lowers anxiety and reminds patients that there’s more to life than what’s on their chart. Sometimes the connection follows them home. The same patient who gave Salaysay his first ukulele was originally in the hospital with a critical head injury. Two years later, fully recovered and engaged, he called with one request: play at his wedding. Salaysay did. “I remember he almost died,” he says. “Today, he’s married with two boys.”

This year, Salaysay earned a Daisy Award, nursing’s highest recognition—a testament to his work beyond the monitors and charts. He reads the room, identifying when someone needs a song or a little hope.

“You have to make the world a little bit better,” he says. “Plant a seed and watch it grow.”

Salaysay has been a nurse for 40 years, the last six in recovery care, and he plans to retire this December. Even though he’s leaving the hospital, he’s not going to stop making the world a little more musical.

The QB of Chaos

When a former boxer checked into Scripps Mercy, she had a punching bag sent to his room. Knowing dementia patients gravitate to dogs and cats, she’ll shop for stuffed animals on Amazon. And while most patients stay three to four days, state and federal laws require others to remain far longer (1,000 days or more) until a safe discharge plan can be created to assure their transfer to the right, safe place. As director of patient care, case management, social services, and rehab services for Scripps Mercy in Hillcrest and Chula Vista, Melody Thomas answers the trickiest logistical questions. For example: When an unhoused patient has a massive stroke, where do they go after their immediate treatment’s complete? She’ll oversee their transfer to a rehab facility, but—depending on insurance, facility availability, and severity of required care—coordination can take a while. In the meantime, Thomas secures their stay while she and her team find the best next steps. Those days in between are called “avoidable bed days.”

Part of Thomas’ role is ensuring the best transition out of acute care; a crucial behind-the-scenes step of hospital treatment. If someone prefers to go home, she’ll work with insurance to send durable medical equipment to the house.

“It’s like coordinating chaos,” she says. The patients who stay for months or years end up like second family members. But for the 10 years in her role (16 total at Scripps Health), she and her team—each with a caseload of up to 25 patients—have personalized the care and the wait.

“We don’t always hear back from the patient or family,” she says. “But when we hear that they arrived [home] and they’re doing well, that’s the most rewarding part of the job.”

The Cookie Queen

Every Monday before lunch, Sharp Coronado Hospital volunteer Doreen Friedman bakes about 200 cookies: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and snickerdoodle. This has been her routine for 17 years, ever since an older volunteer trained her on frozen cookie dough and a tucked-away Easy-Bake Oven. Now, she’s known as the Cookie Queen.

The moniker came from a concierge who ordered her a Cookie Queen hat, and it stuck. There’s more baked good royalty, too: a Cookie King, plus a rotating crew of volunteers who cover for each other so the hospital never goes a day without fresh complimentary cookies. A bit ironic to see free cookies in a hospital, but it has been a favorite since the program started in 2002. Patients and healthcare workers alike all love it—especially the radiologist who smells them down the hall.

For Friedman, the job is less about baking than the exchange: “I get more out of giving the cookies away than they do,” she says. She thinks of Richard, a longtime visitor now homebound. She still swings by his house every Monday because he can’t get to the cookies anymore. Night nurses used to miss the window of cookie availability, so once a month, she bakes four dozen just for them. “People will say to you, ‘You made my day. You don’t understand what this cookie means,’” she says.

Turning 80 this October, Friedman shows zero signs of stopping. “A Cookie Queen can be any age,” she says, adding that she’s the oldest one wearing the crown, the one who bakes the most, and the one who stays the longest. Her philosophy comes down to one line: A warm cookie and a smile are “the best medicine for the day.”

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