My personal etiology experience

What I would like to reflect on today is actually something we covered the very first day of class. Dr. Hollist/Cody (I don't know what he would prefer to be called) introduced two terms to us: epistemology and etiology. As soon as I heard the definition of etiology, which basically means "how things develop" or "where things come from," I automatically thought of everything that's been going on physically/medically with my mom because we had recently discussed that exact question - how did this all start? My mom had some scar tissue removed on her hand and it came back as this huge, hard bump on her hand that was definitly not a beauty mark. So, she had it removed again and the doctor gave her something to take while it started to heal, well, that caused a bacterial infection and made her feel like crap and eventually led her to getting a CAT scan and seeing a gastroenterologist to have all kinds of tests done (an endoscopy, a colonoscopy and an endoscopic ultrasound). After finding a pre-cancerous cyst on her pancreas she ended up having to have surgery to get 40% of her pancreas removed as well as her spleen. And then there have been all kinds of little repercussions slowing the healing process since then, including a trip to the ER for horrendous nausea and vomiting, but she is finally about 60-70% back to normal and things are finally healing and recovering well, the way that they're supposed to. So, in conclusion, where did this all start? With the removal of some scar tissue on my mom's hand. But we are thankful that the drugs she was given for that did cause negative repercussions because it helped us find out what was really wrong, before it turned into something malignant - which would have been pancreatic cancer. Thank goodness the cyst was benign! And that is my experience with etiology:)