My husband Dario died of Septic Shock. He didn't have to.

On July 30th, 2017, I lost Dario, my husband of 28 years, a man with a laugh I have never heard on anyone else, to Septic Shock. He was 63 years old. He was warm, loved, and present in every room he walked into. And he died in a hospital, days after what should have been a routine recovery from open-heart surgery.

Dario had lived with a Bicuspid Aortic Valve and an Ascending Aortic Aneurysm for eleven years. Surgery was carefully planned, long anticipated, and considered successful. By all accounts, his recovery was impressive. His cardiac surgeon said so. He was discharged five days after surgery.

Five days later, something changed.

I noticed a subtle but worsening shortness of breath; not dramatic, not a fever, not the symptoms most people associate with a crisis. Just a quiet, persistent decline that I could see but couldn't name. When I brought him back to the hospital, the ER doctor wanted to send him home with antibiotics. He was thirteen days post cardiac surgery. I challenged her. I refused to leave.

Had I not, we would have walked out that door.

Dario was readmitted. In the days that followed, his symptoms were attributed to Dressler's Syndrome, a rare but recognized complication of cardiac surgery. It was a clinically understandable assumption. It was also wrong. What Dario had was Sepsis, triggered by a Staphylococcus aureus (Staph A) infection acquired during his surgery. By the time Septic Shock was identified, it was too late.

He was not alone in this. And that is why this petition exists.

Every year, "approximately 18,000 Canadians die from Sepsis, with 75,000 new cases occurring each year," (Dr. dos Santos, Unity Health Toronto/St. Michael's Hospital); more than breast cancer, prostate cancer, and HIV combined. It is one of the leading causes of death in Canadian hospitals, and one of the most preventable when caught early. Yet Canada remains one of the only developed nations without a standardized national Sepsis protocol.

The United States has one. The United Kingdom has one. Australia has one.

Canada does not.

That means the speed at which Sepsis is recognized, and the protocol used to treat it, depends entirely on which hospital you walk into, which doctor is on shift, and whether someone in that room happens to know what to look for. Dario walked into the wrong room on the wrong day.

No Canadian family should have to depend on luck.

The financial cost alone demands action. Sepsis costs the Ontario healthcare system approximately $1 billion annually, due to prolonged hospital stays, intensive care treatment, readmissions, and long-term care for survivors. A national protocol reduces those costs by catching Sepsis earlier, treating it faster, and preventing the cascade of organ failure that makes it fatal.

But the lives needlessly lost is what keeps me up at night.

I am a wellness educator and patient advocate with 30 years of experience. I knew more than most people about how the body responds to infection. And I still lost Dario; because the system around him had no consistent, standardized way to catch what was happening in time.

That is not a personal failure. It is a systemic one. And systemic failures require systemic solutions.

A national Sepsis protocol would ensure that every healthcare provider across Canada, regardless of which hospital, which province, which shift, has standardized tools and procedures, and mandatory yearly training to recognize and treat Sepsis early. It would save lives that are currently being lost to inconsistency, misdiagnosis, and delay. It would mean that the next family sitting in a waiting room gets a different outcome than ours did.

Sign this petition. Share it with everyone you love. Because the next family it saves could be yours.

For Dario...and every Canadian family who deserved better.