prepare for an emergency Cesarean section. After the surgery, Churchill was completing paperwork in the delivery room when Waters looked in on a patient in the early stages of labor Churchill had been attending to across the hall. She ordered Churchill to check on that patient. Churchill responded "You don't need to tell me what to do", and then complied with the order. Koch was very upset by this interference. At a meeting the next day with Waters and Stephen Hopper, the hospital's president and chief executive officer, he criticized Waters' conduct and the effect of the cross-training policies. Churchill was later given a written warning for insubordination; she chose not to either make a written response or file a grievance, which she had the right to do, as she "did not want to make mountains out of molehills". Waters' annual evaluation of Churchill was overall positive, but noted an increasing antipathy toward her. In January 1987, a cross-trainee, Melanie Perkins-Graham, mentioned to Churchill over dinner during a meal break, with Koch present, that she was considering transferring to obstetrics. The exact nature of the ensuing conversation was central to the ensuing dispute. Since the break room was located immediately behind the main nurse's station in obstetrics, others overheard all or part of it. Ballew, whose work-related absences from the nurses' station limited her exposure to the conversation, and head nurse Jean Welty, were among them. The next morning Ballew told Davis that Churchill had spent 20 minutes "knocking the department" and specifically criticizing Waters and Davis, saying the former was trying to get her fired and the latter "was going to ruin this hospital". After the conversation, Ballew claimed, Perkins-Graham was no longer interested in transferring. The morning afterwards, Davis asked Perkins-Graham to tell her about the conversation. Perkins-Graham told her that Churchill "had indeed said unkind and inappropriate negative things about Cindy Waters" and confirmed the complaints about the ward and the criticism of Davis. Davis decided to fire Churchill for what she considered continued insubordination, but did not do so until after she had consulted with Waters, Hopper and the hospital's personnel director. Churchill appealed to Hopper, her only recourse under the hospital's employee policy, but after a meeting with her and the personnel director he told her that the negative evaluation the month before counted as a second written warning and thus her termination had followed