From ICU to Inner Peace: What a Lifetime in Medicine Taught Me About Grace

I used to believe grace was something reserved for Sunday mornings — something quiet, polite, draped in stained glass and whispered prayers.
But I found it in far stranger places:
in sterile hallways under fluorescent lights,
in the chaos of code blues and the stillness of holding a stranger’s hand as they took their last breath.

I found grace in the ICU.

But not at first.

At first, I found adrenaline.
And exhaustion.
And the strange exhilaration of being needed — constantly, relentlessly.
For decades, I lived inside the machinery of medicine, where every shift was a test of endurance, every chart a record of someone else’s suffering.
And somewhere along the way, I lost touch with the quiet hum of my own life.

Like so many of us in healthcare, I became very good at disappearing.
I disappeared into scrubs, into shiftwork, into showing up for everyone but myself.
I knew how to triage trauma, but not my own.
I could comfort a dying man’s family, but not speak the grief building in my own bones.
I could restart a heart — but I didn’t notice mine was slowly closing.

The truth is: medicine taught me a thousand things about the body.
But it took burnout to teach me anything about the soul.

There came a point, sometime after COVID, sometime after the weight of one too many losses,
when the part of me that had kept going finally said,
“Enough.”

It wasn’t dramatic.
No collapse, no great scene.
Just a quiet, internal knowing that I couldn’t live like this anymore —
hypervigilant, hollowed-out, haunted by the perfectionism that used to keep me afloat.

And that’s when I began to search, not for a new career, but for something deeper.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was searching for inner peace.
Not a bubble bath.
Not a day off.
A real reckoning — the kind that invites you to look at everything you thought made you valuable,
and ask:
Who am I without the role? Without the badge? Without the stethoscope?

The answer, it turns out, is both terrifying and liberating.

This blog — and my podcast — is not about leaving medicine.
It’s about finding yourself inside it, or after it, or somewhere between what you gave and what you still want to become.

It’s about transformation and about grace —
not as politeness,
but as power.
The kind that whispers, “You’re allowed to choose yourself now.”

To anyone who’s ever lived in the chaos of caregiving and wondered if there’s life beyond medicine…
there is.

And it’s waiting for you —
in stillness, in beauty,
in the sacred act of becoming more than what the world once asked of you.