HC International Blog Posts

These days, my calendar fills itself in healthier ways. Friendships and relationships require time and tending, and I’ve surprised myself with how much I want to give both. The old version of me would have resented the effort, would have seen it as another obligation. Now, it feels like life.

Chris knows the American surgeon experience from the inside (the hours, the call, the CYA defensive documentation, the pressure to produce) and now he knows, just as clearly, what it looks like to practice in a system built on very different assumptions about labor, time, and professional boundaries.

This piece is not an indictment of the French system. It is a confession. And an acknowledgment that, in several crucial ways, the United States treats surgeons - and medicine itself - with a seriousness that France has gradually eroded.

Sitting in a Paris café, listening to Samiya describe a different world: one where residents are not crushed, where surgeons have time to think, where rest is designed rather than stolen, our conversation led to the simple realization...

When I think of that first month, I don’t remember the chaos of lists or the panic of conversions. I remember the registrar handing me a flat white, the phrase “soft seven” curling into the air like steam. It turns out not everything has to begin with a jolt.

I think of how many of them disappeared behind their own eyes. And how normal it was to watch them go. I couldn’t bear to be another one of the gone. So I boarded a plane, crossing hemispheres and seasons, holding only this hope.