My mother was born in Bertha, Ala., in the same farmhouse and in the same bed her mother was born in. The attending physician was Papa Doc, her grandfather. It’s virtually impossible for me today to imagine the outrageous awkwardness of my grandmother’s position then, being prematurely delivered of her first child in her own parents’ bed and assisted by her father-in-law, the only doctor in the county.

But as odd as this scenario seems to me, both my grandmother and my mother were the lucky ones. In that place and at that time, having a doctor present at childbirth was a luxury. Perhaps that’s the reason why, though she was born in a farmhouse several weeks early, my mother thrived.

These days, almost all of us are shepherded into this world by at least one doctor and shepherded out by several others. We visit a doctor’s office just before or just after some of the most crucial milestones of our lives: when we enroll in kindergarten or high-school or college, when we take a lover (at least if we’re female), when we marry, when we conceive a child, when we’re gravely ill. If we travel abroad, we visit a doctor for inoculations against diseases we haven’t been exposed to here. If we take up a challenging sport, we ask a doctor for permission to play. We assume that our doctors will take good care of us.

For both doctors and patients, there’s a downside to all this trust and all this care. Unless your doctor happens to be your father-in-law, you pay through the nose for it. And paying high insurance premiums and sometimes even higher fees can give patients a certain proprietary attitude—the sense that they’re perfectly justified in waking a pediatrician at 2 a.m. to alert her to their child’s runny nose, the conviction that every bout with the flu warrants a trip to the internist. Never mind that most reasonable adults understand there’s not much to be done about a virus; if they’re paying for a doctor, a doctor they intend to have.

One downside to the doctor-patient monopoly that gets a lot of media play is the incompetence of physicians—or if not their incompetence, at least their horrific mistakes. A recent article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine claimed that as many as 25 percent of all deaths from heart attack, stroke, and pneumonia are the result of medical mistakes. And that’s just an impersonal statistic. The individual tales of surgeons who remove the wrong breast or the wrong leg, or of pediatricians who misdiagnose a potentially fatal e coli infection as a simple stomach virus, are reported in newspapers and magazines virtually every day. Though we may actually love and depend on our doctors, we’re a little afraid of them—and of their humanity as well. They can heal us, or they can watch us die.

What doesn’t get reported in the papers and on television, of course, is just how often our doctors do not fail us, how often they pore over our charts and test results and discern a possible cause for our seemingly inexplicable pains.

Most illnesses, even serious ones, rarely present themselves in textbook form when they exist in actual human flesh. A woman with a kidney infection does not always run a fever. A man with an enlarged appendix does not always wince when poked in the belly. Every doctor has seen patients who defy the norm, patients whose symptoms contradict themselves or refuse to point to a known solution. Some of these patients get better on their own, to be sure, and some of them go on to die, but many of them get better because a doctor heals them.

A reporter from The New York Times did not fly to Birmingham, Ala., last spring when my mother went to the emergency room complaining of stomach pains. Newsweek did not follow the story as doctors ruled out condition after condition: not a stomach virus, not diverticulitis or appendicitis, not a blocked colon. No one from 60 Minutes arrived to document the miracle that followed. Instead of sending her home with ibuprofen and an admonition to rest, a doctor went over her test results one more time.

What he found was a rare disorder that would have killed my mother by the end of the day. Despite a combined 65 years of medical experience, none of the three emergency-room surgeons had ever seen a patient with this condition. They went back to their medical textbooks, they went to the Internet, they called in a specialist, and they created a treatment that they hoped would work a cure. For five days Mom was in intensive care. On the fifth day, they pronounced their treatment successful and moved her to a regular hospital room. On the sixth day, they let her go home.

It was not the kind of medical miracle you read about in the newspapers—tumors shrinking inexplicably on their own, HIV-positive newborns who show no trace of HIV antibodies when tested several months later. A lot of people prayed for my mother when she was in the hospital, but this was not the kind of miracle whose only possible explanation is prayer. There was hard work and science involved too. Mostly, there were good doctors.

It’s my own great fortune to be cared for by more than one good doctor. The ob/gyn who’s seen me through five pregnancies and the births of three children, daily embodies both intelligence and kindness; for more than six years she has cheerfully endured my unending barrage of questions as I’ve tried to understand what smarter people than I must go to medical school to learn.

Likewise, my children’s pediatrician treats them and me with gentleness and respect and has never once suggested that I might be an overprotective, hysterical mother, though at times in her presence I’ve behaved like one. And our family internist wants us to call him at home—instead of having the answering service page whatever doctor from the practice is on-call—if we feel bad at night. “I’m your doctor,” he says simply; “I’ll take better care of you than anyone else.”

Mom’s out of the woods now, and in the time since her scare I’ve been in and out of a hospital myself, safely delivering my third child and bringing him home healthy and strong. It’s probably only natural that I’m thinking a lot these days about physicians—of my great-grandfather who brought my mother into the world, of the obstetrician who helped me become a mother myself, of the pediatrician who treats my children as tenderly as if they were her own, of the internist who heals me now that Mom is too far away to bring me a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and kiss me when I’m ailing.

Most of all, I’m thinking about a doctor I’ve never even met, someone who just happened to be in a Birmingham, Ala., emergency room when my mom got sick, someone who didn’t give up looking for an answer when the obvious explanations had been ruled out. He saved my mother’s life. What a remarkable gift, in its way as amazing and marvelous as the gift of my own children, or of my life itself, the life my mother gave me all those years ago. For such gifts, there is no adequate response. The best I can do is to look around me, paying attention to every single one of the miracles. The best I can do is to remember to say, “ Thanks, doc.”