Welcome to Chasing Life. Today I like to start with a quick story, a very personal one for me.

It was Christmas Eve 1993 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, snowy night. It was my first year out of medical school.

I was an intern in the surgery department there at Michigan. And that night I happened to be taken care of a

very sick elderly gentleman who had started to develop some fluid in his chest. I was doing a

procedure known as a thoracentesis. You basically put a needle into the chest to try and drain the fluid.

It's a commonly done procedure and relatively simple,

if you know what you're doing. And frankly, by that point in my training, I was sort of a pro

at thoracentesis. I knew how to do it, just by the book. But for whatever reason, something

went wrong that night.

There was bleeding, and the patient had to be rushed off to the operating room.

Again, this is Christmas Eve.

I had already been in the hospital for a full day, full night, and now another full day.

But I couldn't allow myself to leave.

I needed to see what would happen to this man.

Well, he came back from the operating room

and then developed something known as coagulopathy.

That means his blood would not clot.

Sometimes that can happen when you have a lot of bleeding.

It can be this really vicious cycle.

And it was for him, because a day later, he died.

Now I'm telling you this because 32 years later in my life,

if you look up in the top right drawer of my desk in my office,

...