pradeep kulkarni

She left a thriving solo practice in Manhattan. It was not burnout. She says that outright, and burnout is the assumption she has been answering ever since. Samantha Nazareth is a gastroenterologist. She signed up for an eight-year medical program as a teenager, did her residency and fellowship in the New York area she was born next to, and built a solo practice in Manhattan, which she notes is quite difficult to do there with overhead that high. She liked it. Her words: she was very fulfilled, and medicine was never a villain in her story. What moved her was a question this field does not train anyone to ask. Her mother, who she was very close to, retired into home hospice and died shortly after, in 2021. Wait until retirement to live your life is what we are all sold, and her mother never got the chance to collect on it. So Nazareth took a six-week sabbatical to Puerto Rico, where her family is from. She had virtual consulting work already running alongside her clinical career, so the money question was answered before she left. She thought six weeks was enough time to invent a new life out of thin air. She has since read that a real pivot can take up to five years. She calls the six-week idea a little ridiculous on her part. Six weeks became six months. The line that should stop any mid-career specialist reading this is the one about competency. She had attained it. Being a competent physician is what the training was for, and it works, and then the rest of a career is standing in front of you. Her question, in her words: do I coast on competency. The rest is not a fantasy about quitting. She learned to swim as an adult, on a beach, because a remote island in the Puerto Rican archipelago only admits certified scuba divers and certification requires a swim test. Two years after that she became a scuba instructor. She took French classes in Paris and got a phrase badly wrong at a friend, repeatedly, with total confidence. She has been to 90 countries, traveling alone, out of a carry-on for a good two years. And the professional part is the part nobody actually asks about. Her work went to telehealth consulting and AI. She did not leave medicine. The way she puts it, the only thing she left was a windowless basement office with artificial lighting. The useful part for anyone sitting with this is what she says about the middle. The leap gets all the airtime. What follows it is a free fall in which one life has ended, the new one has not started, and by every visible measure nothing is happening. She insists that is where the work is. Her original title for the book was Liminal. Her advice is one thing: solitude. Time in a park, time by the water, a ten-day silent retreat, whatever version is available. Medicine trains you to override your own needs and perform, for good reason. Nothing in that training teaches you how to ask what you want afterward. "Always stay a student. Be a student, stay curious. Learn something really uncomfortable." Her memoir is I Left Anyway: The Life I Was Supposed to Want. Listen to the full conversation on The Podcast by KevinMD. Link in the replies. What is the last thing you learned that you were genuinely bad at? #ThePodcastbyKevinMD