Hey there, Stephen Dubner.

We are replaying a series we made in 2023 called How to Succeed at Failing.

This is the second episode.

We have updated all facts and figures as necessary.

As always, thanks for listening.

In early 2007, Carol Hemelgarn's life was forever changed by a failure, a tragic medical failure. At the time, she was working for Pfizer, the huge U.S. pharmaceutical firm.

So she was familiar with the health care system. But what changed her life wasn't a professional

failure. This was personal. My nine-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was diagnosed with leukemia, ALL, on a Monday afternoon, and she died 10 days later.

In this day and age of health care, children don't die of leukemia in nine days.

She died for multiple medical errors.

She got a hospital-quired infection,

which we know today can be prevented. She was labeled. And when you attach labels to patients,

a bias is formed. And it's often difficult to look beyond that bias.

So one of the failures in my daughter's care is that she was labeled with anxiety.

The young resident treating her never asked myself or her father if she was an anxious child and she wasn't.

What happens is we treat anxiety, but we don't treat scared, afraid, and frightened. And that's what my daughter was. Hospitals are frightening places to children. So my daughter, with her hospital-acquired infection, became septic, but they were not

treating her for the sepsis because all they could focus on is they thought she was anxious,

and they kept giving her drugs for anxiety.

Even though the signs, the symptoms, and me as her mother kept telling

them something was wrong, something wasn't right, they wouldn't listen to me. So by the time,

by the time she was failing so poorly and breast to surgery and brought back out, there was nothing they could do for her.

The first harm was unintentional that they did to our daughter. It was all the intentional

...