As I sat in my car last night and watched the fireworks, from a parking lot in West Palm Beach, I pictured myself one year ago, sitting in my car, in a parking lot, on the opposite end of the country.

Like last year, tonight, I cried. Unlike last year, my tears being representative of fear, uncertainty, and my grim reality, tonight’s tears represented joy, gratefulness, and most importantly, recognition. I recognized that it is excellent patient care that saved my mother’s health and life.

I silently thanked the team of physician service providers, nurses, as well as our advanced technology, for blessing me with the woman I was able to call tonight to remind just how much she is loved and appreciated every single day.

Remembering what I saw walking into that hospital room, one year ago, makes me realize how easily the outcome could have gone the other way. The person I saw in that hospital bed, after flying in from Chicago, was not the mother I knew for 32 years. Her face was swelled three times its normal size, as were her hands and feet; a ventilator was breathing for her, essentially keeping her alive; tubes and machines, beeping and buzzing surrounded her bed and her being on all sides.

I did not react in her room, even though the doctor told me she did not know I was there. But when I walked through those hospital doors and got outside, I collapsed. I asked God, “If surviving this hinders my mother’s life physically, please take her.” And if that was the first thought that entered my mind, there was a reason. My mother is the one an only thing in this world I will not compromise.

She had acquired Legionnaire’s Disease, and suffered a mild heart attack. A smoker for more than 35 years (she quit 10 years ago), she was diagnosed with COPD about 10 years ago, not helping her cause. She was really, really sick. And I was really, really scared.

Three other patients in the ICU, who were there with Legionnaire’s Disease during my mother’s admittance, did not survive. It is a serious illness, and it does serious damage. When the staff prepared my mother for her move to the rehabilitation center, one of her doctors pulled me to the side.

“I apologize for telling you that your mother was unaware of your being here. Watching you with her the past three weeks has made me, all of us, see something in you two; maybe patients need love, as much as medicine, to survive something that nearly kills them.”