What a milestone taught me

The grandkids are 4 and 7 months old now. I'm still getting used to being called Grandpa Ben.

This weekend my partner and I traveled to Texas to watch my bonus son graduate from his emergency medicine residency. He and his partner have the seven-month-old. She's a year ahead of him, working locums, and in a few weeks they'll both be practicing emergency medicine. I sat in that crowd listening to them talk — not about the schedule or the system, but about the medicine itself. The cases they want to see. The good they think they can do. They were pumped.

Here's what got me. These two are not naive. They've read the same headlines you have. They know the burnout numbers. He trained through the nights and codes and the days that don't leave you. And he's walking toward the work with his eyes open and his sleeves rolled up.

He's not the only one. My daughter is starting her third year of neonatology fellowship, aiming for an academic center that does the hard things on purpose. One of our own fellows is staying on faculty to build an acute care pediatric cardiology program from the ground up — new protocols, new quality networks, a real step up in what we can do.

Three people. One thing in common. Every one of them has done hard things, knows exactly how hard this is, and is still excited about the future instead of bracing against it.

I think we get the burnout conversation half right. We name the cost, and we should. But somewhere in the naming, we started talking about physicians as if exhaustion were the whole story. It isn't. The people I watched this weekend are tired and clear-eyed and still building. Both things are true at once. The hope and the hard parts live in the same room. The trick isn't choosing between them — it's refusing to let go of one to make peace with the other.

That's the conviction I keep returning to: people are the asset. Not the protocol, not the new network, not the next EHR module. When we invest in people so they can grow and stay, the patients get better care and the system gets stronger. It compounds. It always has.

I went to Texas expecting to be the one offering perspective. I drove home with theirs.

Read this week's blog: a mid-year legacy reset →

-Ben

P.S. — Who's someone earlier in their career who reminded you lately why you do this work? Hit reply and tell me one thing about them. I read every one.