Liz Salmi at Stanford Medicine X

The video of my talk at the Stanford Medicine X conference is now live. A full transcript of this talk can be read in a blog post from September 2016.

The first 4 minutes are a video vignette about my patient experience. My 5-minute talk starts around the 4-minute mark.

I want to thank everyone who helped me craft and rehearse this talk: Hugo Campos, Erika Dimmler, Elisabeth Effron, Jennifer Laam, Melanie Levy, and my husband Brett.

I especially want to thank my mom who had no idea I was going to tell this story until the day before I was going to do it at Stanford.

I called my mom while sitting inside of my car in the Trader Joe's parking lot in Palo Alto. I said I wanted to practice my talk on her, and I wanted her to know the content of the story. After hearing me run through the talk my mom said she didn't know that I "felt that way" about my dad. She questioned whether or not people at a medical conference would be interested in this story. I said I questioned the same thing. In fact, I was afraid the whole talk was TMI (too much information).

But in the end, after delivering this story, I have heard from many people who identified with my experience. These are people who don't normally connect with my brain cancer background. All I can say is, not everyone has a perfect home life. You never know what is really going on unless you express it.