When you win the Doctor Lottery, there is no cash prize but a far greater payoff: the possibility of extraordinary healing, even a miracle. Our son survived because our physician took the time to listen, show compassion, partner with us, advocate and provide just the right care to save a life.

My family and I haven’t always won the Doctor Lottery. My father’s surgeon, for instance, had pushed him to have the bowel resection to “cure” him of diverticulitis, a disease in which the colon’s lining becomes inflamed. He stitched up my father’s intestines with a suture known to dissolve in patients who have been on steroids and hadn’t read my father’s chart to see that his internist had recently put him on cortisone. Nor did he look at the list of medications my father had carefully written down on his patient-intake forms. When the sutures dissolved, my father, who had a bleeding disorder, went into shock. His abdomen was distended and hard.

My mother asked the nurse to page the surgeon. “My husband is in so much pain!” she said. The surgeon, who was playing golf, told the nurse to tell my mother, “Pain after surgery is normal.” By the time my father developed a fever and peritonitis, it was too late. He died of a heart attack. “Normal courses of antibiotics proved unsuccessful,” my father’s death report reads.