 Just as the nurse was about to put down the white padding that was over my incision, my mother said, wait a minute, there's something on her stomach. It looked like a mole. And my mother asked the nurse to call the doctor to come back. And she didn't want to. She said, I am not going to call the doctor for what's going to turn out to be nothing. My mother said, I'll call the doctor. I'll never forget. I was looking at my doctor, and I raised the gauze. And I just saw his face completely change. And when I looked down at my abdomen, the black dot was gone, and there was a quarter-sized pustule. The infection kept spreading, and it was starting to go down my leg. Over 2 million patients a year get hospital-acquired infections. I ended up having six more surgeries, nine blood transfusions. I left the hospital with an open abdomen that took three years to close. My hospital, they were cited for being in violation of five state laws and 10 federal laws for unsanitary conditions in their operating rooms. It took me 10 years of almost weekly physical therapy to get back to a new normal life. I spent this past year, 2017, fighting for my life all over again. I went to the hospital with a sinus infection, and they said, OK, we're going to keep you because it looks like you're starting to be in the early stages of sepsis. Well, the next morning, the infectious disease doctor came, and he said, oh, great news. We're going to send you home. And I said, really? And he said, you know my history? I said, I'm a survivor of sepsis, pseudomonas, MRSA, VRE, and necrotizing fasciitis. Can we wait until my labs come back before you discharge me? And I'd like to see what some of the cultures are saying. And he goes, oh, we didn't do any cultures. We don't need that. And we did a test for pneumonia and influenza, and you're fine. You don't have those. So we're going to go ahead and let you go home. And I said, well, can I get a second opinion on that? Can we talk to someone about that? And he said, I'm the best infectious disease doctor in the valley, probably the state. Any other doctor is going to tell you the same thing I'm telling you. I ended up having two more surgeries, two more blood transfusions, deep vein thrombosis, blood clots in both arms. I was right back where I was five years before. And it just, it really cemented for me the need to change the way we teach doctors, the way we treat doctors, the way they interact with patients and patients interact with them. We need to start sharing patient experience with our medical students, with our nursing students, so that they can get it from the horse's mouth. When you're building your house, your profession, you want to make sure that you build it on a solid foundation of patient safety. It's a major reason why we've seen 50,000 fewer preventable patient deaths in hospitals. And if you want to know what that means, ask Alicia Cole, who suffers the long-term effects of the hospital-acquired infection. You know, we've learned a lot in health care, and we're better than we were 10 years ago. We're doing great at talking about patient-centered care. We're doing great at talking about preventing errors. We've got to do better in the action of it.