The Patient's Expectation and the Doctor's Expectation
Today I saw a news story: an American father, after doctors declared his son brain-dead, refused to believe that his son was truly brain-dead. Because he knew his son had a history of epilepsy, when the hospital was about to remove his son's organs, he confronted the police and hospital armed, and kept calling to his son at the bedside. A few hours later, the son who had been judged brain-dead responded. The father was sentenced for endangering public safety, but his son thereby snatched back his life.
Medicine is an imperfect science; it is fraught with uncertainty and with fatal errors. Often a doctor judges a patient's survival to be very short, yet the patient and family refuse to give up, and after persisting in various attempts, their survival far exceeds the doctors' expectations.
On the matter of a particular patient's life and death, the doctor's expectation and the patient's expectation often differ. Most of the time, doctors reason and judge from statistical data alone; but for the patient, his own life is everything, and his expectation far exceeds the doctor's. The fact is that the expectations of patients and families are sometimes right, and the doctors' expectations wrong. Life is stubborn; it cannot be judged by still-immature medicine. Miracles always exist.
On treatment plans, doctors are often forced to choose relatively conservative options out of concern for medication safety. In fact, taking a moderate risk can let some patients escape from the gates of hell. In treating terminal illnesses such as cancer, doctors' expectation is mostly to avoid undue risk in their practice, while the patient's expectation is to throw everything aside and merely survive. These expectations are very different; hence some cancer patients abandoned by hospitals, refusing to sit still for death, go everywhere looking for other treatments - and this effort sometimes actually succeeds.
Different expectations lead to different treatment plans, and different treatment plans produce entirely different outcomes. This may be why, when patients and families persevere, miracles sometimes finally happen.