This wasn’t the first time during Natalie’s illness eight years ago that I broke my promise to just be her dad. It started a week earlier when she came into the den and showed me the blood she’d coughed up. I suspect a father without my experience might have chalked it up to flu. Maybe because I was a transplant surgeon, and always considered the worst possible cause whenever a patient had a hiccup, I took her to the hospital. I was worried the blood meant she had a bacterial pneumonia, a bad one. And it did.

On the way to the hospital, Natalie took a deep breath and looked at me. “Am I going to die?” she asked. I’m convinced that she would have been dead before morning had I not been a doctor, and one who could recognize septic shock when it affected a normal teenager.

I am haunted by that moment, and others like it involving people I love. My younger son, Joe, almost died 15 years earlier from septic shock, the same kind that killed Jim Henson. He became ill while I was out of town. I flew home and by the time I arrived at the hospital, he looked deathly ill to me. I told the nurse I thought he should be transferred to the intensive care unit, but she said the doctors thought he was improving. Joe stopped breathing during the night and I have blamed myself ever since for not insisting they move him.

Over and over again during my dad’s last few years of life, I felt as if I should have just moved in with him so that I could prevent all the well-meaning doctors and nurses from killing him. Sometimes it was just because his doctors weren’t talking to one another and their conflicting prescriptions sent Dad to the hospital.

In the end, he died about 10 minutes after receiving an injection I didn’t want him to receive. From my home in Omaha, 800 miles away, I asked his caregivers not to give him a medication that I worried could be lethal but that they insisted was routine for old people like him. I thought we’d reached an agreement but while on the road to visit him the next day, I got word that his heart had stopped.

Last year my wife’s mother had colon surgery and when we went to visit her in a rehabilitation center two days after her release, I discovered that she had an abscess the size of a lemon in the wound. It was red and swollen and she said it hurt like the devil but the attendants had assured her it would get better because she was on antibiotics. We took her to the E.R. where the nice doctor used an ultrasound to look it over and told me he didn’t see any pus there. But I could see a large pocket of pus, so I asked him to call the surgeon. The surgeon probably told the E.R. doctor to humor me, but as he took a knife to the wound, no one in the room except the E.R. doctor was surprised when creamy yellow, foul-smelling pus shot out of the wound and soiled the young man’s spotless shoes.

I have more stories like this. What are the odds of that? I don’t think it’s me.

After three days in the hospital, Natalie got better. A new chest X-ray showed that there was much less fluid in her chest. Her fever resolved. They changed one of the antibiotics and the nausea she had had all but disappeared. They told her she could go home. They prescribed antibiotics for her to take at home, and removed her IV catheter.