When Life Changed My Path, I Chose to Make a Difference
From sepsis survivor to healthcare innovator: How lived experience became a mission to transform patient care.
When Life Changes Your Path, You Get to Choose What Comes Next
There are moments in life when the path in front of you no longer looks anything like the one you planned.
For me, that moment didn't come from a career decision, a business plan, or a lifelong dream of becoming a healthcare entrepreneur.
It came from becoming a patient.
I survived septic shock, cardiac arrest, prolonged hospitalization, multiple surgeries, amputations, and a recovery that required me to learn how to navigate healthcare from an entirely different perspective.
Eventually, I began rebuilding my life.
I returned to being a mother, wife, and professional. I wrote my story. I became more involved in advocacy. I learned how to adapt to a body and a life that had changed dramatically.
I could have stopped there.
There would have been nothing wrong with focusing solely on my recovery and moving forward.
But something kept bothering me.
I had seen too much to simply look away.
Once You See the Gaps, They're Hard to Unsee
My experience showed me healthcare from a perspective I had never known before.
I saw extraordinary medicine and extraordinary people. I experienced firsthand what skilled clinicians, nurses, surgeons, therapists, and other healthcare professionals can accomplish.
They helped save my life.
But I also saw how incredibly complicated healthcare can become for the person trying to navigate it.
Information existed, but it was scattered.
Different pieces of my care lived in different places.
Questions often occurred to me after an appointment rather than during it.
One specialist might address one part of my recovery while another focused on something entirely different.
And after leaving the hospital, an entirely new set of questions began.
The more I experienced, the more I wondered how many other patients and caregivers were struggling with the same things.
Eventually, I stopped accepting:
"That's just how healthcare works."
And started asking:
"Why does it have to?"
That question changed my direction.
Choosing the Unfamiliar Path
I didn't come from Silicon Valley.
I wasn't a healthcare executive.
I wasn't a software engineer.
I didn't have investors waiting or a startup team sitting around a conference table.
What I had was lived experience, curiosity, determination, and a growing understanding of a problem I believed deserved attention.
So I made a choice.
I decided to dive in.
That decision meant entering spaces that were completely unfamiliar to me.
- Healthcare data
- Technology
- Artificial intelligence
- Privacy and security
- Product development
- Compliance
- User experience
- Business operations
- Funding
- Software architecture
- And countless other subjects I never imagined would become part of my everyday vocabulary
There have been many moments when I've had to say:
"I don't know this yet."
I've learned to appreciate the importance of that last word.
Yet.
Not knowing something doesn't mean you don't belong in the conversation.
It means you learn.
You ask questions.
You find people with expertise you don't have.
You listen.
You challenge your assumptions.
And then you keep going.
Patients See Things Differently
The deeper I moved into healthcare innovation, the more convinced I became that lived experience deserves greater visibility in the places where healthcare solutions are created.
That doesn't mean patients replace clinicians, engineers, researchers, or healthcare leaders.
We shouldn't.
Each brings expertise that matters.
But patients bring something different.
We know what the system feels like from the other side.
A healthcare professional may see a clinical workflow.
A technologist may see a data problem.
A business leader may see an operational challenge.
A patient may see the moment when none of those pieces connect.
And sometimes, that perspective reveals opportunities that are difficult to see from inside the system.
Organizations such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality have emphasized the importance of patient and family engagement in improving healthcare quality and safety.
I believe that engagement should extend into innovation, too.
Patient voices shouldn't only be invited in after something has already been designed.
Sometimes, the people who experienced the problem should have an opportunity to help shape the solution.
I Didn't Want My Experience to Become Only a Story
Writing Through the Ashes gave me a way to tell what happened.
Advocacy gave me a way to speak about it.
But eventually, I wanted to go further.
I didn't want my experience to exist only as a story about something terrible that happened to me.
I wanted to ask:
What can I do with what I learned?
That question eventually led to Phoenix Health Compass and Phoenix Navigator.
Neither began because I simply wanted to create another healthcare platform.
They began with questions.
What would have helped me?
What would have helped my family?
Could reliable healthcare information be easier for patients to find and understand?
Could patients be better prepared for conversations with their healthcare teams?
Could we make complicated healthcare journeys easier to organize and navigate?
Could technology support patients without pretending to replace the clinicians caring for them?
The questions became ideas.
The ideas became prototypes.
The prototypes became platforms.
And somewhere along the way, what began as a patient's frustration became a founder's mission.
Making a Difference Doesn't Require Having Every Answer
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that purpose sometimes arrives before confidence.
I didn't wake up one morning suddenly feeling qualified to enter healthcare technology.
I started because the problem mattered enough for me to learn.
There is an important difference between pretending to know everything and believing you are capable of learning something new.
I ask questions.
I bring in expertise where I need it.
I listen when someone knows more than I do.
I change direction when evidence tells me something isn't working.
And I continue learning.
For me, that's not a weakness of entering a new field.
It's part of doing it responsibly.
This Isn't About Fighting Healthcare
My experience could have made my mission about everything healthcare gets wrong.
But that isn't why I do this.
I am alive because healthcare also gets extraordinary things right.
People fought to save me.
Surgeons reconstructed my body.
Nurses cared for me during some of the most vulnerable moments of my life.
Therapists helped me regain abilities I had lost.
My family and I encountered people whose compassion and expertise changed the course of my life.
Wanting healthcare to improve doesn't mean rejecting everything that already works.
Quite the opposite.
I believe healthcare is worth improving because I know firsthand how powerful it can be.
My goal isn't to tear down the system.
It's to help make parts of it easier for patients to see, understand, and navigate.
Sometimes Making a Difference Looks Small
We often imagine "making a difference" as something enormous.
I've learned that it doesn't always look that way.
Sometimes, it means sharing a painful part of my story because another survivor needs to know they're not alone.
Sometimes, it means advocating for patients who haven't found their voice yet.
Sometimes, it means speaking with healthcare professionals about what recovery looks like outside the hospital.
Sometimes, it means sitting in a meeting discussing privacy, data, or technology.
Sometimes, it means reviewing one small feature and asking:
"Would this actually help the patient using it?"
And sometimes, it means staring at something I don't understand yet and deciding I'm going to figure it out.
Those small decisions accumulate.
Eventually, they become a direction.
You Are Allowed to Choose Another Path
There is another version of my life where I survived, recovered as much as possible, returned to what was familiar, and never pursued any of this.
Sometimes, I think about her.
Choosing this path has required vulnerability.
It has required learning publicly.
It has required walking into rooms where I don't always have the traditional background of everyone sitting at the table.
It has required investing time, energy, resources, and belief into something without knowing exactly where it will lead.
But I would rather try to contribute something meaningful than spend years wondering whether I could have.
My life changed without asking my permission.
What I did with that change was my choice.
I chose to write.
I chose to advocate.
I chose to speak.
I chose to learn.
And eventually, I chose to build.
Not because I believe I have all the answers.
But because I remember exactly what it felt like to be the person desperately looking for them.
When Life Changes Your Path
I never would have chosen what happened to me.
I would give almost anything for my family not to have experienced it.
Purpose doesn't require pretending that trauma was somehow a gift.
What happened was devastating.
What I chose to do afterward is where purpose entered the story.
Today, I'm still learning.
Still building.
Still asking questions.
Still discovering where this path will take me.
But I've realized that you don't always need to know exactly where a new path ends before you're willing to take the first step.
Sometimes, you see something that needs to change.
You decide you're willing to help.
And then you dive in.
I didn't choose the circumstances that changed my life.
But I did choose what I would do with the life that remained.
I chose another path.
And each day, I am choosing to use it to try to make a difference.
Christina A. Cole
Author, Through the Ashes
Founder & CEO, Phoenix Health Compass & Phoenix Navigator
Healthcare Innovator | Patient Advocate | Sepsis Survivor
