Josie’s Story

From Barnes & Noble

Often, numbers serve as anesthetics that diminish the magnitude of real human events. We know, for instance, that every year, 98,000 Americans die because of medical errors, imagining the real human toll is utterly incalculable. Pain is doled out one family at a time. In the case of 18-month-old Josie King, it came in the form of a single shot of methadone, sending her little heart into fatal arrest. As her mother, Sorrel King, unfolds her story, we realize that such deadly mishaps don't occur because of singular lapses at health care facilities, but because essential communication often doesn't occur in stressful hospital environments. Josie's Story isn't just heartbreaking and inspiring; it serves as a lifesaving corrective to practices that can hurt us all.

Publishers Weekly

In 2001, the six-member King family had just relocated to a new home in Baltimore when tragedy struck: 17-month-old Josie, wandering unsupervised, turned on a hot water tap and was badly scalded. Rushed to Johns Hopkins hospital, Josie spent 17 days in recovery and was scheduled to be released, but sudden cardiac arrest killed her before she made it out. The hospital admitted their mistake: improper hydration and a mistakenly administered dose of prescription painkiller methadone. Even more shocking, the Kings learned that theirs was not a unique tragedy; in the U.S., somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 people die every year from medical errors. Using their $1.5 million settlement, the Kings founded an advocacy group, the Josie King Foundation, which, in partnership Johns Hopkins, spearheads a national drive for patient safety programs. This painful but inspiring memoir is a compelling drama of family grief amid the dysfunctional U.S. health care system, buttressed by a 20-page resource guide for patients, families and health-care providers.
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Kirkus Reviews

A toddler's needless death in a hospital transforms her mother into an activist against medical errors. King's slender, often wrenching memoir recounts not one but two parental nightmares-a child's unnecessary injury and her premature death. Josie was just 18 months old when she scalded herself in the bathtub of her family's Baltimore home, the victim of a faulty temperature panel. Frightening as her injuries were, she was recovering from them nicely at Johns Hopkins, one of the country's finest hospitals. Then the staff wrongly administered a drug that killed her. Her grieving parents learned that 98,000 Americans die from such medical mistakes each year. With the settlement money from Hopkins, her mother co-founded the Josie King Foundation to reduce that mortality rate by encouraging hospitals to adopt patient-safety programs. In unadorned prose, the narrative delineates the author's evolution from despair-stricken parent to enraged avenger determined to destroy Hopkins to public activist seeking to extract some good from her child's death. King excels in capturing small moments freighted with poignancy: her older children refusing to kiss their unconscious sister goodbye before her life support was turned off, her memories of Josie spilling juice ("I would lean over and wipe it up, never realizing how lucky I was"). The author includes a resource guide for patients, their families and health-care professionals. Eschewing literary stylishness, King tells her story with a straightforward style that makes it all the more powerful.