The first time I got married was in 1977, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

After training as a pediatrician, I took a job in a hospital caring for children with cystic fibrosis (CF), an incurable genetic disease. Watching these children suffer and die was wrenching, and the experience raised many philosophical questions that I had never given much thought to previously: What is the purpose of life? Why do people suffer? Why do some people cope relatively well with the challenge of a loved one’s disease and death, while others fall apart?

One of the most painful aspects of my work was that medications for CF were available in the United States but were very costly to import, and most of my patients’ parents could not afford them. I remember one mother leaning out of the window of a high floor and threatening to throw herself to the ground if the government wouldn’t help her get the medication her daughter needed. Eventually, we were able to import the medication with the government’s help, but even then, there was never enough for everyone. The image of that desperate mother haunts me to this day.

Working in an environment where I was constantly exposed to death and the fragility of life, I began to understand that we are all in G-d’s hands. We have the freedom to do as we please, but ultimately, He is the one who decides what will happen to us. As a doctor, I saw again and again how limited my abilities to heal are and how little I know about who will live and who will die. At times, I would render a prognosis that a patient wouldn’t live out the year, only to be surprised to see that person alive five years later — or the reverse. Much as I wanted to cure my patients, I quickly learned how powerless I was in the face of the Divine will.

Being a doctor was also of little help to me when I became a mother, as all it did was make me anxious and paranoid. Knowing all the worst-case scenarios in the book, any symptom that any of my three kids presented sent my mind into a tizzy of what-ifs. I couldn’t understand how some of my colleagues managed to treat their own children, matter-of-factly dispensing medication for common childhood ailments. To me, these ailments invariably portended far more sinister conditions.

It didn’t help that I was actually right on one occasion. I was concerned that my newborn daughter had an underdeveloped trachea (tracheomalacia), and I took her to the doctor who had taught me, in medical school, how to detect this problem. He assured me that my baby was fine, but I wasn’t convinced, and I kept bringing her back to him until, finally, he admitted that I was right.