A transplant physician faces facts about his career

<p>"Continuing to do this work the way I was doing it was not sustainable. I needed to get off the merry-go-round. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t think I could stop myself—transplant was my duty, my responsibility, and what I was trained and programmed to do. It was hard to imagine leaving my post, but I needed to find a graceful exit, an elegant off-ramp that would satisfy my need for a tidy conclusion. One way or another, I wanted off the roller coaster, so I could never again be crushed by a patient like Tina. That had been my life for nearly twenty years. That was enough.</p> <p>I felt yanked around by the ups and downs of the job, my emotions seesawed, and all the while I had to make rational decisions for my patients. But for me, the job was no longer a pure and simple exercise in rationality. I had mastered the mechanics of being a transplant doctor— that was the easy part. But now, from an emotional standpoint, every wife was my wife, every child was my child, and every father was my father. And I needed to save them all."</p> <p><a href= "https://medicine.tulane.edu/departments/pulmonary-diseases-critical-care-environmental-medicine-clinical/faculty/david-weill-md" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">David Weill</a> is a pulmonary and transplant physician and author of <a href= "https://amzn.to/3sG9W3c" target="_blank" rel= "noopener noreferrer">Exhale: Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant</a>.</p> <p>He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, "<a href= "https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/05/a-transplant-physician-faces-facts-about-his-career.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A transplant physician faces facts about his career</a>." (<a href= "https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/05/a-transplant-physician-faces-facts-about-his-career.html">https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/05/a-transplant-physician-faces-facts-about-his-career.html</a>)</p>