Growing up in a household with two devoted Christian Scientists, I was grateful for my parents’ example of commitment to Christian Science and demonstration of it, but I hadn’t really made it my own. I regularly attended church and read the weekly Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, but because I hadn’t had any significant challenges, I more or less went along and simply hoped that I would know enough to address a big problem if one came along.
That opportunity came when my husband and I were on a short vacation during the Memorial Day holiday weekend in 1996. The week leading up to the vacation, I had been suffering from severe headaches that made daily activities very painful. The discomfort reached a climax during this trip. I contacted a Christian Science practitioner, but I didn’t experience any relief from the symptoms, so we left our vacation early and decided to stop at a 24-hour clinic for urgent medical care.
Upon examining me, they prescribed me aspirin. I had never taken aspirin before and didn’t relish the idea. I recall looking at the pills before swallowing one and thinking, “These really can’t help me.” It turned out that they didn’t help me, and the irony was that the headaches became more severe. This helped me begin to understand the mental nature of illness and disease. As Mary Baker Eddy states on page 149 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “The prescription which succeeds in one instance fails in another, and this is owing to the different mental states of the patient.”
