When Amy Vilela’s ex-husband called her in a pre-dawn panic one June morning in 2015, yelling that their daughter had been taken away in an ambulance, Vilela was confused. Surely he couldn’t be talking about 22-year-old Shalynne. They’d spoken on the phone just the night before, and Shalynne had been characteristically upbeat and excited about the future. She was studying to become a nurse. “She was very funny, very independent, very driven,” Vilela tells Teen Vogue.

Vilela thought there must be some mistake. Why would a healthy 22-year-old be in cardiac arrest?

A few weeks earlier, according to a legal complaint Vilela later filed, Shalynne had gone to an E.R. in Las Vegas, complaining of pain and swelling in her leg. She placed an anxious call to her mother, unsure about her insurance status. Vilela thought she was being ridiculous. “Don’t worry about the insurance,” Vilela recalled saying. “We’ll take care of it; we’ll pay.” Shalynne was then briefly examined and dismissed, the complaint against the hospital claims. She called her mother again. “I’ll never forget her voice. She was desperate, she said, ‘They’re not helping me.’”

The complaint says that they told her that she should go get insurance and then come back to see a specialist about her knee. In addition, the complaint says that the hospital staff didn’t inquire about her medical history or the relevant medications she took. According to the complaint, the hospital staff got her race wrong, marking her down as Hispanic, when Shalynne was half white and half black. “They sent Shalynne to her death,” Vilela, now a national surrogate and Nevada co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, tells Teen Vogue. The complaint states that a look Shalynne’s medical history should have revealed she was at major risk for a blood clot, and her symptoms were consistent with the life-threatening condition.

A few weeks later, Shalynne flew to her father’s house in Kansas City. One morning, she woke up in severe pain. Her dad called 9-1-1.

Once Vilela realized the severity of the situation, she rushed to Missouri. She found her daughter unconscious and hooked to life-support, the room reeking of blood from the hemorrhaging.

“Her eyes would flutter open…I would just sit there and keep repeating to her ‘Please fight, Shalynne, please fight,’” Vilela recalls. “I would go out in the parking garage and just wail and scream.”

Over the next several days, she says hospital staff advised the family to turn off life-support. They held on as long as possible, but ultimately had no choice.

“I climbed into bed with her and I held her like I used to when she was a child,” Vilela says, describing their final moments together. “I sang songs about her like I did when she was a baby. I tried to memorize everything about her: her face, her hair.” Vilela wished they could trade places. “I was ready to die. I didn’t want to watch my child take her last breath. Death would have been easier.”

“At this point all I could feel was pain. There was no other emotion possible at all. The anger didn’t come til later,” she says.

Vilela had not been politically active before. Eventually, in her grief, she started doing research, discovering that her daughter was one of thousands of casualties of America’s health-care system. She came across the grim statistic that an estimated 35,000 Americans lose their lives from lack of health insurance annually. One day, while surfing YouTube, she came across a video from 1993 — the year Shalynne was born. In it, a white-haired Vermont politician rants about America’s unjust health-care system. “Mr. Speaker, the American people believe that health care must be a right of all citizens and not just the privilege of the wealthy,” then-Representative Sanders says in the C-SPAN clip.