“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other” ― Anton Chekhov
I used to believe medicine was forever. Not a job, not a title, but an identity- etched into my name, my days, my sense of worth and my purpose of life. For years, I introduced myself through it, measured time by ward rounds and on-call nights, and learned to breathe in the quiet rhythm of monitors and x ray lights.
So when the day finally came- the day I quit medicine- it did not arrive with drama. No slammed doors. No farewell party. No touching speeches with emotions. Just a long, heavy silence.
That morning felt strangely ordinary. The hospital looked the same: the same corridors polished by countless hurried footsteps, the same smell of antiseptic and fatigue. Patients still waited in anxiety. Colleagues still nodded while passing in a hurry. Yet inside me, something had already ended.
Medicine had taught me how fragile life is. It taught me how a number on a screen could change a life forever, how a diagnosis could steal sleep from even the strongest minds. It taught me discipline, humility, and how to stand in the presence of grief without turning away.. Some days, it allowed me to be a miracle. Other days, it asked me to be a witness to one.
But it also taught me the cost of carrying too much for too long.
I learned to normalize exhaustion, to accept missing birthdays and anniversaries, to answer calls at 3 am with a steady voice while my own heart quietly frayed. I learned how to care deeply for others while slowly neglecting myself and my loved ones.
It was in the eyes of my son, who had learned to say “ Daddy’s at the hospital” with the same certainty as “ the sky is blue”, and the way my wife’s hug felt like a question I no longer had the energy to answer.
I told myself it was temporary, that this was the price of doing something meaningful and great in life, that one day it would feel lighter.
One day never came.
Quitting medicine felt like betrayal- of my younger self who fought so hard to get in, of my mentors who believed in me, of patients whose stories still lived in my memory. I wondered if walking away meant I was weak, ungrateful, or simply not enough.
But on that day, as I removed my white coat for the last time, I realised something gentle and terrifying at once: staying would have meant abandoning myself.
Leaving did not erase the years I gave. It did not undo the hands I held, the lives I touched, or the nights I stayed when I could have left. Medicine shaped me irrevocably. It taught me how to listen, how to sit with uncertainty, how to respect life in all its complexity. Those lessons did not resign when I did.
The day I quit medicine was not the day I stopped caring. It was the day I chose to care differently.
I began to understand that purpose does not belong to a single profession, and healing is not confined to hospitals. Sometimes, healing means stepping away. Sometimes, saving a life means saving your own.
I still carry medicine with me- in the way I notice pain behind a smile, in the patience I extend to strangers, in the reverence I hold for time. I did not fail medicine. I completed a chapter.
And on that quiet day, when I walked out from my clinic without applause or certainty, I felt something unfamiliar but true: grief for what I lost, gratitude for what I lived, and hope-fragile, honest hope- for who I might become next.
Finally, with a profound and liberating sense of relief, I walked away from the unrelenting, suffocating cacophony that had defined my professional life. It was a noise composed not of the urgent, vital sounds of saving lives, but of a bureaucratic din—an endless stream of questionnaires, audits, and compliance forms generated by the insurance companies and the increasingly profit-driven hospital management. This administrative burden was a constant, draining distraction from patient care itself.
More than the paperwork, I was walking away from the paralyzing, omnipresent fear of medicolegal implications. Every decision, every procedure, every handwritten note was filtered through the terrifying possibility of a lawsuit. It was an environment where defensive medicine became the norm, driven not by the best interest of the patient, but by the defensive posture of the practitioner.
The joy, the intellectual challenge, and the humanitarian core of medicine had been eroded by the weight of liability, leaving only the anxiety and the hollow performance of risk management. Stepping out was not a failure; it was a reclaiming of my peace and my integrity, choosing freedom over the constant, low-grade terror of the system.
The day I quit medicine was the day I stopped treating patients. But it was also, perhaps, the day I began the long, slow work of saving a life. My own. And in doing so, I discovered that healing is not a destination contained within hospital walls. It is a current that can flow in may directions, even inward, even when it begins with a heartbreaking, necessary goodbye.
