I didn't see it coming. That's the part I have trouble saying out loud, even now — that I, someone trained to read bodies and anticipate problems, couldn't read my own.
It started the way it starts for most of us. Not with a dramatic breaking point, but with accumulation. Fourteen years of early mornings and late nights. Patients I helped and patients I couldn't. Two malpractice suits in three years — both resolved, both technically behind me, neither one gone. A daughter who stopped asking when I'd be home because she already knew the answer. A system that kept asking for more documentation, more metrics, more justification for decisions I'd been trained to make on instinct.
I told myself I was managing it. The glass of wine after a hard shift became two. Two became something I looked forward to more than I should have. I wasn't impaired. I was careful — surgeons are always careful. But I was using something to get through the nights that I hadn't needed before, and some part of me knew what that meant.
I didn't stop, though. I reasoned with myself the way physicians do. I built a case for why I was fine.
It was a colleague — someone I'd worked alongside for six years — who said the thing that got through. She didn't make it a confrontation. She didn't cite evidence or give me a referral sheet. She stopped me in the hallway after a long day and said, quietly:
"Are you okay? I'm worried about you."
Eight words.
I didn't respond well at first. I said I was fine. I walked away. But I couldn't unhear it, because she'd said out loud the thing I'd been working so hard not to think. Someone who knew this work, who understood this life, had seen something I was hiding from myself.
I reached out to the Physician Health Program two weeks later. Not because I had to. Because someone reminded me that I didn't have to figure this out alone.
I'm still practicing. I still have hard days. But I know now that getting help early isn't weakness — it's the same instinct that makes us good physicians. Catch it before it becomes something harder to treat.
If you're reading this and something in it sounds familiar — you don't have to be certain it's a problem to reach out. Early is better. The PHP is confidential, it's safe, and it's there.
And if you're reading this thinking of someone else: say something. Eight words is enough.