Miracle or Outlier?

A story in the New York Times about a cancer patient who wanted to live to see her daughter’s wedding caught my attention.

Haider Javed Warraich, a resident in internal medicine writes:

As a physician, I never liked the word “miracle.” I preferred to think in terms of “medical outliers.” And yet that day of the wedding did feel like a miracle. Physicians often share their patients’ sorrow, but rarely their joys. No, we had not discovered the cure to cancer, but we felt that we had achieved something powerful — freeing, if only temporarily, our patient from her disease.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/a-wedding-in-intensive-care/?module=BlogPost-ReadMore&version=Blog%20Main&action=Click&contentCollection=Private%20Lives&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body#more-152466