Line Up

You might not know that doc­tors’ busi­nesses in the US are going bank­rupt. Mine did. Not me per­son­ally, but the busi­ness. Med­i­cine is a cog in the econ­omy like every­thing else. Lots of cogs are blow­ing out. I have a story, like every­one who goes bankrupt.

When I went to med­ical school I learned that doc­tors are pretty well respected. I think that most peo­ple live with a level of dis­trust for doctors…except their own. The other thing I learned was that if I lined up and kept my nose rel­a­tively clean (which I have not nearly always done) I would have job secu­rity in addi­tion to respect and I could buy a nice house with a man­i­cured yard and super lin­ear shrub­bery. I learned that I would work my ass off and I could expect to not make a nickel if I didn’t show up to work. No pas­sive income to speak of.

Some of those lessons have changed. I have touched on the respect part above. Job secu­rity is not a given, although it is much bet­ter than many fields (but see below and above), and I still believe that there is always room at the top and I make my plan to be the best sur­geon I can. I do indeed work hard and pas­sive income is still hard to come by.

So my bank­ruptcy story has to do with a part­ner play­ing Jenga with our prac­tice. He sud­denly quit (not a typ­i­cal part­ner move), defaulted on finan­cial respon­si­bil­i­ties, and those remain­ing got to watch the rather remark­able tum­bling and destruc­tion of a decade of work. I recently went to traf­fic school for a ticket (I got a warn­ing one early morn­ing from a really nice cop and the next day at the same time, place and chan­nel we did a rerun. We both (kind of) had a laugh about it) and dur­ing the 6 hours of “class” we saw many slow-mo traffic-signal traffic-cam videos of car wrecks caused by dri­vers who were either a)inattentive or b)angry, I learned. Even though they are dis­turb­ing there is an irre­sistible mod­ern dance feel to a car wreck that draws me to it. I catch my breath as the cars, which are usu­ally stub­bornly solo, find one another, finally. There is some­thing beau­ti­ful in it. Any­way, I kept think­ing that I was being reminded of some­thing. Now I know that it is the demise of my busi­ness caused by inat­ten­tion, resent­ments, assump­tions. As I have lived through the process, I will indulge myself in another metaphor: it’s like when the charges go on a build­ing being razed and the cen­ter gen­tly drops to its knees and the arms of the build­ing appear to rise in praise or supplication.

Even though I am mak­ing (up) some­thing beau­ti­ful about this betrayal and embar­rass­ment (I will take the lib­erty of claim­ing this blog as my attempt at beauty), I am here writ­ing to get it out of me that I do feel exactly betrayed, pissed, and embar­rassed. I am not look­ing for com­fort, to hear its going to be ok (I know for sure it is more than ok, no mat­ter what – for instance we have already been bought by a medium-sized (Ross not Macy’s) box store of a medical-practice-buying group and we didn’t miss a day of work – lots to be grate­ful for). I am let­ting myself have the feel­ings and I since I tell you about things like that, I am telling you about this. My (X)-partner? He knows his motives. I don’t. Don’t want to. I don’t think Karma is too wor­ried about a lit­tle med­ical prac­tice in Cen­tral Ore­gon, but who knows? I do. It’s not. At a min­i­mum I will rec­om­mend that he not come here for a ref­er­ence. His behav­ior is his prob­lem (or reward depend­ing on if you are me or him, I guess) and I am sure he will have an inter­est­ing and reward­ing story about all this. My job, today, is to come to terms with rebuild­ing, remem­ber­ing who I am instead of look­ing at what I do, and pay­ing atten­tion to these dif­fi­cult feel­ings. Like with my lit­tle kiddo, if I pay atten­tion and stay present when he is uncork­ing, he gets dif­fer­ent in a bit. If he goes through uncork­ing alone or he sees me ignore it, it is actu­ally dam­ag­ing to him and he saves it as one of those mil­lions of unfelt feel­ings that we store and even­tu­ally have to find an anes­thetic for. It’s ironic that anes­the­sia means to have no feel­ing and in the world of our emo­tional selves it is feel­ings not felt that look for anes­the­sia, not the ones that we strug­gle through, feel fully and move on from. Those ones bounce away from us as harm­less as the tire thrown bounc­ing down the road after a wreck.