She'll be relived after test

One more test. Tomorrow I will take my mother to the hospital for a stress test. This worries me. The woman just had a heart attack and now they want to give her a stress test? Shivers go up my spine.
It is just one more thing that I don’t understand. Anybody who has ever been to the doctor knows what it is like to put your faith in the practice of medicine.
I am painfully aware that the people who hold our lives in the palms of their hands are just that — people. No better and no worse than you or me. They have bad days when nothing goes right. They have days when they would rather be home than at work. Some are better at their jobs than others. Sometimes they make mistakes. They are human.
Medicine is an imperfect science. Man cannot and does not know everything. The best that science has to offer is not always enough. The human body is a wondrous thing and can malfunction in an endless variety of ways. It seems as soon as we discover a cure for one disease many more are waiting in the wings to make our lives miserable.
Sometimes the cure seems worse than the disease. Sometimes waiting for results is agonizing. Sometimes the news is good and sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is harder to watch a loved one suffer than to suffer yourself.
At any given moment thousands or perhaps millions of people are dealing with one sort of bodily malfunction or another. Sometimes this is minor, like a hangnail, other times it is life-threatening and scary like cancer.
The problem is that life itself is ultimately fatal. Nobody gets out of this world alive. Our goal is to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible. To that end, we have doctors and nurses and all sorts of other medical personnel.
We put our faith in their hands. We take the potions and drugs they prescribe even though the side effects make us miserable. We let them slice us open and remove or modify our  parts. After all, if we don’t have faith in their abilities what is left? Despair? Hopelessness? We have to do something and so we put our very lives in the hands of others.
In spite of believing wholeheartedly in modern medicine, I also believe that we know our own bodies better than any doctor ever will. Commonly accepted “facts” don’t always apply to everyone. For example, every doctor will tell you that breast cancer doesn’t hurt. Yet pain is what caused my mother to have the tests necessary to discover her breast cancer. She is a survivor for almost a decade because for her, breast cancer hurt.
So when doctors tell me something I take it with the proverbial grain of salt. I try it their way and if it works, fine. If not, I have no problem trying something else or questioning them. I think that is part of the reason that the upcoming stress test scares me. It doesn’t make sense to me. Plus, I’m a natural worrywart. Then there’s that whole business about all of us having to die eventually.
I have friends who are recovering from surgery who are in much more pain than my mom is. I have other friends who are still fighting the unknown and worrying that their cancer has not been completely eradicated. Others are waiting for a dreaded diagnosis. Yet, I am not as worried about them as I am my mom.
She is a part of me in a way that my friends are not. She may depend on me to provide transportation or other things but I depend on her to be there. I am worried and look forward to getting this last test over with.[[In-content Ad]]