Mitch McConnell is having a bad day. If he can’t wrangle support for the Better Care Reconciliation Act from moderate GOP senators, then he might have to actually talk to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

I’ve had bad days, too.

There was the day I learned that my 10-year-old son, Mason, had a tumor in his head the size of a lemon. The morning of his brain biopsy wasn’t much better, but we found out that it was a slow-growing tumor, too entwined to remove surgically, but at least the cancer wasn’t likely to spread.

We managed through many hard days that included chemotherapy, small hemorrhages in Mason’s tumor, another brain biopsy. Then came the worst day of my life, when I found my son with his head in his hands moaning amid a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

That began a series of 180 days of varying awfulness when my son woke up from a coma unable to walk, talk or eat. On the days he failed his neurological exams because he couldn’t manage a weak thumbs-up, I felt gutted and hopeless.

Day 82 in the hospital stands out, because on this good day the Affordable Care Act did away with lifetime limits on care. The $2 million lifetime cap on Mason’s health coverage established by our private insurance policy was ticking away, a price tag attached to every ear infection, the snail he ate when he was 5, the chemo, the biopsies, each emergency room visit for a troubling headache. It felt like there should be a celebration with balloons.

Our private insurance became our most valuable possession: It stood between us and medical bankruptcy.

My husband worked all day, then met me at the hospital for frozen dinners in the parent lounge and the night-shift bedside. We took our responsibilities seriously, as did the other parents in the pediatric ICU.

The days accumulated into the hardest six months of my life, culminating when Mason stood up from his wheelchair and ceremonially walked out of the hospital a new version of himself, but still hilarious, if unsure on his feet and unable to eat much by mouth, yet determined and positive.

Our story is one of miracles, tenacity and the good fortune to have excellent private insurance and access to top children’s hospitals, which are on the front line in treating childhood cancers, accidents, illness and birth defects.

If Majority Leader McConnell hadn’t locked himself in a room to write the BCRA, then he might have noticed that a lot of Americans are talking about their bad days right now.

But the GOP leadership is treating repeal and replace like it’s the Super Bowl. It’s the trophy they want. These pesky questions about sick kids (more than half of patients treated at children’s hospitals are enrolled in Medicaid) and people in nursing homes (two-thirds depend on Medicaid) seem to be beside the point. When McConnell gathered people who looked and sounded just like him to write the bill, he created an echo and then called it the voice of the people. It’s not.

There’s only one team that matters here — the American people, which includes those 22 million individuals at risk of losing care, and many, many more who will be affected by scaled-down insurance plans, care caps and hospitals burdened with the influx of the newly uninsured.

With stakes this high, I respectfully ask the Majority Leader to pull on his big-boy pants and call Schumer. I believe the GOP calls this taking “personal responsibility.” I don’t think talking to Sen. Schumer will be so bad. Many of us have had to deal with a lot worse.

Janine Urbaniak Reid is a San Francisco Bay Area writer.