For a long time, I thought burnout meant I had stopped loving medicine.

That was never really the problem.  I still love my patients. I love the relationships, the teaching, the moments when I knew I had genuinely helped a child or family. I love being the person families trust with their most frightening questions. What I can no longer tolerate is everything surrounding that work: chronic understaffing, shrinking autonomy, endless documentation, uncompensated responsibilities, and the expectation that physicians would simply absorb whatever the system could not provide.

I absorb a lot.

As a rural pediatric endocrinologist, I care for a large, complicated patient population while working with a skeleton team. When staff leaves, I pick up the slack. When schedules overflow, I double-book. When documentation does not fit into the workday, I finish it at night, on weekends, or on my day off. I want to be productive, dependable, accommodating, and good at my job.

Eventually, I became the wire holding everything together: But I am twisted, frayed, and still expected to carry the current.

Burnout followed me home. I was anxious, irritable, and mentally preoccupied with work even when I was with my family. I began to wonder whether I could remain a physician at all.

Then I started making changes.  AI documentation gave me back hours every week and, after injuries to both hands, helped me continue working when typing was nearly impossible. I closed my practice to most new patients. I stopped automatically saying yes to committees, meetings, and unpaid responsibilities. I became less precious about my notes and more protective of my time. Most importantly, I started asking whether my choices supported my actual priorities: family first, health second, and work third.

And now, I have gone part time.  Part-time work is not a failure to handle medicine. It is how I am making medicine sustainable. I still get to care for patients, teach families, and use the knowledge I spent decades developing. But I also have more space for my children, my health, my marriage, and parts of myself that had been crowded out by work.

The surprising thing is that stepping back has not made me care less. It has helped me see more clearly where I want to direct that care.

A New Way to Help Families

My next chapter is beginning to take shape: a consulting business for parents of children with chronic illness.

Parents of children with chronic conditions are asked to become nurses, schedulers, pharmacists, insurance experts, advocates, and emergency planners – often overnight. They track numbers, symptoms, medications, appointments, and supplies. They worry about school, sports, sleepovers, siblings, adolescence, independence, and the future.  All of that work is necessary. But illness can slowly become the center of family life. Every conversation becomes a reminder, a correction, a question, or a negotiation:

Did you take your medicine? What was your number? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you bring your supplies? Are you feeling okay?

A parent who is trying desperately to protect a child can begin to feel like a disease manager instead of a parent. The child may feel monitored rather than known. Both may become frightened, frustrated, and exhausted.  I want to help families navigate that tension.

My goal is not to replace medical care or tell parents how to manage a child’s treatment. It is to help both the parents and the kids to think through the human side of chronic illness: communicating more effectively, preparing children for greater independence, reducing conflict, protecting family relationships, and making room for childhood beyond the diagnosis. The disease may always require attention. It does not have to define the relationship.

Burnout Can Clarify What Matters

I am still recovering from burnout. Going part time did not erase years of stress, repair every problem in health care, or turn me into a person who is endlessly calm and balanced. But my life is better.  I have learned that freedom does not necessarily mean never working again. Sometimes it means having enough financial and emotional breathing room to choose how you work. It means recognizing that more income, more production, and more praise are not always worth the time they take from the people and priorities you love.  For most of my life, being a doctor was not simply what I did. It was who I was. I believed that choosing myself or my family over medicine meant abandoning my calling.

Now I see it differently.  I am not walking away from the work I love. I am choosing a version of it that leaves room for a life. I am continuing to care for children in my medical practice while finding a new way to support the parents who care for them every day.

Burnout forced me to stop. Going part time gave me room to breathe. And that space is helping me imagine what comes next – not from fear or exhaustion, but from purpose.