Seven children. Eleven grandchildren. A long career in medicine. And memories of La Rabida forever etched in his mind.

“If La Rabida didn’t exist my children wouldn’t exist,” Dr. Brian Mulligan says.

In 1951, at just 4-years-old, he spent his days in a hospital room.

“It seemed like a big room to me,” he says.

There were other children in the room, and a baby in the crib in the corner. He was supposed to be on strict bed rest.

“I had a heart murmur and most of the others did too,” he remembers.

“We would just jump from bed to bed like toads. Back and forth back and forth, and when we made enough noises the nurses would appear and make us get back in bed. All the fun was over.”

He remembers there was a window by his bed facing the harbor. It was a glimmer of life during an otherwise isolated summer.

“That’s where they tied the boats up,” he recalls.

He spent the summer staring out into the bay, amused. It was a polio summer, too. Outside of the hospital parents were warning their children not to swim in swimming pools, because of fear the virus was waterborne.

His diagnosis was acute rheumatic fever, with heart murmurs, and valvular incompetence (now a doctor in his own right, Dr. Mulligan explains this was caused from strep throat). Since his valves were leaking, and his heart was enlarged, he was treated with twice daily penicillin shots.

“So every morning and afternoon nurses came with a tray,” he says. “They held us down and gave us a shot. And that’s how I lived for many months.

It saved my life because they knew what was wrong with me and they gave me a proper treatment,” he says. “It wasn’t my time to die. Without a place like that I could have done very badly.”

Now 74-years-old and living in Lisle, Illinois, the retired radiologist tells the story to his grandchildren.

While the hospital is a much different place than it was in 1951, he’s proud it still offers the highest quality care to children.

Because of that care, he says he doesn’t think about the pain or the fear, or being a small, sick boy in a hospital.

He remembers surviving.

“La Rabida saved me,” he says.