As someone who values authenticity, I want to share my stories with all of their bumps and scars, not just my highlight reel. 

The last two years have had me on a crazy journey. In 2021, I hit rock bottom. Since then I have started to rebuild myself from the ground up.

I was on this trajectory to become a general surgeon. I’d graduated from medical school with my MD in 2020 and started my intern year in general surgery. I was so freaking excited until I had all of that excitement and enthusiasm beaten out of me. 

What I didn’t fully realize is that I had grown up feeling like I had to be an efficient, achievement-driven machine, to sacrifice my own wants and needs for the sake of others, and to avoid making mistakes at all cost. I unconsciously feared punishment, rejection, and the threat of having love withdrawn from me. 

This led me to mask in public, have different personas I would pull out in different settings,  and to squash the parts of me I thought other people didn’t want to see, hear, or know. 

With that programming in my back pocket, I started residency at a place that abuses their residents. Nothing you did was ever good enough and it was always your fault. 

You worked more than 80 hours this week? That’s because you’re not efficient, not because you had too much work on your plate. You didn’t know something? Well clearly you didn’t study or prepare enough. 

You think that patient is having a problem that we aren’t adequately addressing? You’re wrong. Your supervisors always know better than you. 

After routinely getting yelled at or sworn at just for asking questions, my curiosity became a liability. Questioning anything became dangerous and grounds for punishment. 

My fear of making mistakes shot through the roof. I had patients’ lives on my hands and little support from anyone. Not to mention we saw some of the most horrible things happen to human bodies.

I now know what “human roadkill” looks like. One man who was very dead was brought in by EMS after he had been run over by a semi-truck at high speed. I’ll save you the gory details, but it was surreal to see a human body be that completely broken.

There were so many more people I helped care for that had been shot, stabbed, burned, or had their limbs ripped off in motor vehicle crashes. That year I had the responsibility of having to do a “death exam” and pronounce three different women as dead. 

The first woman I pronounced as dead was younger than me. A photo of her four-year old daughter was taped to the wall across from her bed. It was brutal.

There were never any debriefs, never time to process the horrific things you saw. I didn’t have a PCP or dentist for that entire year, let alone a therapist.  

It felt like I lived off adrenaline during those twelve months. I was on edge all the time, waiting for the floor to fall out. One day I had a panic attack at the start of my shift in the emergency room when I learned my co-intern was put on remediation. 

Even though I had decided in October that I was going to leave the program, I felt like I had to protect myself at all costs. Internally I was screaming at the top of my lungs, but externally I had a huge smile plastered on my face. 

Masking all the time was exhausting. I lied about why I was leaving, and pretended like everything was fine. But watching my colleagues be punished day in and day out for just being trainees was heartbreaking. I felt so f*cking helpless.

When I moved across the country to start my second year as a psychiatry resident, the PTSD started. I saw my former colleagues everywhere in the faces of hospital employees in blue scrubs and scrub caps.

Every Tuesday I was on edge for the lectures, fearing I would be called out and ridiculed for not knowing the right answers to questions. I worked my ass off to be as efficient as possible, especially since I hadn’t studied psychiatry for the last two years.

After the excitement of my first month, the depression started to creep in. That same hopelessness was triggered a few times when I was required to perform care plans I feared were not in the best interest of the patient. With each moral injury, I felt like a piece of me died.

Every day was a challenge to just get out of bed in the morning. I dreaded going to work and began pulling away from my new colleagues. I’d make excuses not to attend social gatherings. 

Gradually thoughts of not wanting to be alive kept popping into my head. For a while, caring for my dog was the only reason I kept living. If I hadn’t adopted my dog when I did, I don’t think I’d be here today.

That’s when I knew I had hit rock bottom and needed to get some help. So I reached out to my program director and asked her if I could take some time off to focus on my mental health. I was very honest with her about what was going on, and she encouraged me to attend a partial hospital program.

I was terrified to be on the other side. To be a provider on the same side as the patients I’d been treating. But my desperation to feel better pushed me to accept the help being offered to me. 

If you’re struggling with depression or thoughts of not wanting to be alive, please reach out to someone who can support you. Call 988, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also see a list of mental health resources put together by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.