Why I Left Medicine... The Day My Life Changed

Today I'm talking about something I don't discuss often—why I decided to leave medicine.

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So—I stopped practicing medicine when I left active-duty military in July 2015. And a lot of people wonder why I left because it's something I don't talk about often.

The truth is that I loved my time working as a flight surgeon with the US Air Force. I loved working with patients and with the ancillary staff, and I miss so much about it.

But in late 2013, I started getting some strange and intermittent symptoms where my face felt like I had shaved with a dull razor. The symptoms went away after a while, but when they showed up a second time, I mentioned it to my wife Allison, who was a neurology resident at the time. She told me to go get an MRI and get it checked out.

My brain MRI came back normal. I went to see a neurologist, but then the symptoms went away again, and I moved on with my life.

Then the symptoms came back a third time, now spreading to the back of my neck. With this new development, Allison recommended I get my cervical spine checked out, too. And that's when my life changed.

I got a call with the results of my MRI, and the physician—one of my colleagues—said I had a demyelinating lesion in my spinal cord, one big one and potentially some other ones. The next day, I was in at the multiple sclerosis (MS) clinic at Mass General Hospital.

As a rated flyer in the Air Force, I was immediately grounded. I fought it and fought it, but they wouldn't let me fly anymore. That was my first foot out of the door of the military.

I considered applying to residency programs in another specialty, maybe PM&R. But after a lot of discussing it with my wife Allison, I decided not to put myself at more risk of my symptoms getting worse.

I decided to focus on impacting students with the podcast, website, and other resources I had already been working on for a while: Medical School Headquarters.

As an update: My lesions haven't really changed in the past 5 years. I occasionally get some tingling or burning sensations in my face and in my fingertips. I don't believe I have MS now, but I still have these demyelinating lesions in my spinal cord. Really, I'm fine, and it is what it is.

I also share in the video how when I joined the Air National Guard, I became the first person ever in the Air Force to get a waiver to go back up in the air with a diagnosis of MS.

For more of my story, check out this episode of Specialty Stories podcast, where I talk all about my path to aerospace medicine: http://specialtystories.com/22.