Had second grader Michael Ehlers been born five years earlier than the was, he wouldn’t be alive. The heart surgery he required 36 hours after birth for his “catastrophic congenital heart defect” couldn’t be done five years prior to his birth.
On a typical Tuesday morning in 2015, my cell phone rang at 5 a.m. I had just landed in Washington, D.C. for a business trip. It was my husband. He said “Honey, someone set the house on fire.”