Janet Lynn Mitchell traced her chronic pain to an unstable right knee that resembled a road map of scars and an atlas of dead-end tissue produced by 10 surgeries over 15 years.

But the knee that hurt even worse was the one she took in the gut upon learning of her doctors’ lies and deception. Mitchell felt betrayed by her surgeons, the system and, perhaps worst of all, by God.

Anger rose inside the California woman like lava through an active volcano after learning that her twisted leg was not the result of “the way God had made me,” as one doctor had put it, but because of a serious mistake during surgery. One of the doctors, who had never performed that particular surgery, accidentally cut into her bone at the wrong angle, slicing stabilizing knee ligaments. During the ensuing cover-up, which included unsuccessful surgeries to try to fix the original mistake, the two physicians used Mitchell’s faith against her.

“They took something that they knew was genuine (my faith) and precious as a way of escape from their mistakes,” Mitchell said recently of the fraud committed against her following the 1977 knee surgery.

In essence, the two orthopedic surgeons blamed God, not themselves, citing a congenital hip problem as the reason for Mitchell’s discomfort.

Only when one of the doctors confessed 15 years later – he later attempted to retract his incriminating statement – did Mitchell discover the ugly truth. At that moment in 1992, the waves of anguish washed over her, bursting her faith and testing her powers of forgiveness. Mitchell chronicles the journey through pain and anger toward mercy and emotional healing in her new book Taking a Stand, which describes how she bounced back from her doctors’ debilitating mistakes to become an advocate for patients rights and protections.