 I had graduated residency. I'd worked for a year or two in private practice. I had two small children. I was married. I had a house, white picket fence, everything you're supposed to do. And I thought I was going to be fine. I would never need any of the stuff that I was referring my patients for. And it turns out it can happen to anybody. I had just opened my practice when I had a vertebral artery dissection. I tore an artery in my neck. It threw clots to my brain. I had multiple cerebellar strokes. And while it didn't prevent me from cognitively functioning as a doctor, it made me completely exhausted, dizzy. I felt terrible. And I went from being able to support my family to barely being able to work. And we found ourselves in a situation where we couldn't buy food. We couldn't access medical care. The Food Resource Hotline is a statewide call center that focuses on providing food resources to the residents of Colorado. We let people know where they can go pick up a box of food. We also ask them a series of questions to see what federal nutrition programs that they may be eligible to receive. The people that call into the hotline are anyone that is experiencing any kind of food insecurity that may need our assistance. People who are experiencing any barriers and cannot get to the county office, such as with transportation issues, medical issues, are people who are working and may not have the time to get down to the county so they can call us on their breaks. My main goal in applying for SNAP was that my kids would have access to healthy food. It's heartbreaking as a parent to not be able to feed your kids. It was such a relief when we were qualified for SNAP. My son was three and a half, though, and he knew what we had not been eating. And the first thing he said is, can we buy a watermelon? I said, yes, we can buy a watermelon. And then we were able to go to the grocery store. I was able to get us healthy food that we hadn't been able to eat for a long time. It was colorful. You know, cheap food is brown. It's rice, it's potatoes, it's oatmeal. Healthy food tends to be colorful, but it's also expensive. The medical referral program allows physicians to refer their patients to the hotline to receive nutritious food resources from us. As a physician, I appreciate the food resource hotline because my patients need access to healthy food. But I can't be the one who finds all their resources that they need. And this is a free service that takes care of that for me and for my patients. We're grateful to have providers such as Dr. Robin Dickinson, who has some personal experience working with her patients, and then also now sending us referrals to the hotline. As a physician, you should screen anyone for food insecurity if they're going through something. If you know that they're going through a divorce, if you know that they lost their job, if you know they have a kiddo newly diagnosed with special needs, if you know that they recently had a stroke or a heart attack, or just anything else going on, that could have pushed them over the edge into food insecurity. So ask.