The Mistress of Medicine

This is a true story about a doctor who lost almost everything to his mistress.

Dr. Van Winkle, a pseudonym, loved his medical career with a passion.

Medicine was an all-consuming lover -- sometimes harsh, and always exciting.

"Medicine is a capricious mistress. I had a love-hate relationship with that mistress," he wrote in response to my story, The Mistress of Medicine. "I was the absent member of the family, with the ultimate excuse."

It was addictive. And medicine loved him back -- almost -- she kept leading him on.

So he gave more.

"Surely, I loved my surgical career in a way no spouse or lover could completely understand,” he recounts, “and I received a form of reciprocal affection."

Meanwhile, Dr. Van Winkle's human tribe outside the hospital walls, fell away. 

"I failed to make my family and friends into my tribe," he writes. "I sacrificed more of my personal family relationships for medicine than I did medicine for those relationships. I lived to regret that in more than one way."

Two years ago, Dr. Van Winkle crashed and burned. The details are so far private.

And then the mistress of medicine abandoned him.

"There's a saying, 'the hospital will not love you back' that you come to understand in the course of burnout," he writes. "When the mistress left me, I was left with almost nothing."

For the past two years, Dr. Van Winkle has been putting himself back together.

More precisely, he's been awakening.

Awakening to the world, to himself -- beyond his identity as Doctor.

"I made a common and fundamental mistake in my career," he reflects. "I came to recognized and identify myself as 'Dr. .....', rather than, 'I am....and I practice medicine for a living'".

Indeed, Dr. Van Winkle came to base his entire identity on a capricious mistress.

"The process of redefining one's identity is long and difficult," he writes, "and comes at a time when one expected to be basking in the afterglow of a noble career." 

Little by little, one day at a time, Dr. Van Winkle is coming to understand his spectacular crash as part of a journey "toward maturity and self-awareness and equanimity," he writes, "and to accept the reality that [I] have been misguided for a significant period of the journey."

Awakening, like the character Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep for 20 years and awakens to a strange world, Dr. Van Winkle is realigning himself with the world beyond the hospital.

“Someone else wrote a new set of rules and implemented them while we were too busy practicing medicine,” he writes.

Spending time in the woods, restoring himself to a wider world, returning to the larger family of the human race, Dr. Van Winkle, is gradually healing.