A
Anthony Gallo
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As medical students, we are often confined to a repetitive cycle that defines much of our four years: studying, eating, barely sleeping, and then studying even more. We learn early to push through exhaustion and to treat our own well-being as something that can wait until after the next exam, the next board score, the next milestone. Somewhere along the way, many of us begin to believe that slowing down is the same thing as falling behind. I believed that too, until my own health forced me to learn otherwise.
Before matriculating into medical school, I was diagnosed with a chronic condition that would ultimately require multiple surgeries over several years. Rather than prioritizing treatment, I did what so many students do: I postponed. There was always another prerequisite, another interview, another reason why my health could wait. Once medical school began, I continued pushing through, attending lectures, preparing for board examinations, and maintaining the appearance of functioning normally while quietly managing pain, recurrent complications, and fatigue behind the scenes.
I convinced myself this was what commitment looked like. I feared that acknowledging my limitations would mean jeopardizing the future I had worked so hard to build.
Eventually, my body made the decision for me. Shortly after undergoing another procedure timed carefully around my board examinations, I developed a serious postoperative complication that landed me in the intensive care unit. In a single day, I went from pre-studying for my upcoming rotations to fighting for far more than my place in a class rank. Waking up in that ICU bed, surrounded by my family and the team caring for me, I was forced to confront a truth I had spent nearly a decade avoiding: I could no longer put medicine ahead of my own health.
For the first time in my journey toward becoming a physician, I took a medical leave of absence.
The physical recovery was long, but the emotional recovery was in many ways harder. While I healed at home, I watched classmates progress through rotations and celebrate milestones I had expected to share alongside them. Like many students who step away, I struggled with isolation, guilt, and the quiet fear that I had somehow failed. After years of sacrifice to earn my seat in medical school, feeling left behind was devastating in a way I had never anticipated.
But those months of recovery gave me something medical school never had: time to reflect. Somewhere in that stillness, I came to a realization that changed how I view this profession. Medical school is only a small chapter in what I hope will be a long career. My path looked different from the paths of those around me, but different does not mean failure. If I was going to fight my way through this chapter, I wanted my experience to serve a greater purpose than my own recovery.
That conviction became the foundation for Pause With a Purpose, an organization I am now building to support students and professionals across medicine who are navigating serious illness, mental health challenges, caregiving responsibilities, burnout, or other life-altering circumstances during their training and careers. The mission is simple: to create the kind of support system I wish I had during the most difficult moments of my own journey, and to help erase the stigma that surrounds stepping away.
Even in these early stages, the need has been impossible to ignore. As I began speaking openly about my experience, I was surprised by how many people quietly shared stories remarkably similar to my own. I heard from students who took leaves to address depression and burnout, trainees recovering from cancer treatment and major surgery, and colleagues who stepped away to care for family members or navigate personal crises. The circumstances varied, but the underlying fear was almost always the same: the belief that taking time away from training would permanently define them.
Often, these individuals did not need solutions. They simply needed someone willing to listen and to remind them that they were not alone. That is the community Pause With a Purpose exists to build.
Medicine’s culture of self-sacrifice runs deep. From the earliest stages of training, we are praised for perseverance and endurance, and those traits have real value, but they become dangerous when they teach future physicians that asking for help is weakness, or that personal well-being is secondary to professional achievement. We would never advise our patients to ignore serious illness in order to remain productive, yet many of us hold ourselves to precisely that standard.
My leave of absence taught me what I wish I had understood much earlier: taking a pause is not failure. In fact, stepping away may be one of the most responsible decisions a trainee can make when facing significant health challenges. Becoming a physician is not a race, and the goal of training should never be to identify who can endure the most suffering. It should be to develop healthy, compassionate, resilient physicians capable of caring for others over the course of a lifetime.
Today, I have returned to clinical rotations stronger than I have been in years, and I am preparing for my Level 2 board examinations while continuing to develop Pause With a Purpose alongside my training. I never imagined that my journey into medicine would also make me an advocate for the people within it. Yet after everything this chapter has taught me, I know that this work will remain part of my career long after my training ends.
To any student quietly struggling behind the scenes, your health is not a detour from your future in medicine. It is the foundation of it. Taking a pause did not derail my journey toward becoming a physician. It helped save it, and it gave that journey a purpose larger than myself.
The author is the founder of Pause With a Purpose, an organization discussed in this article.
AI assistance was used to draft the abstract and conflict of interest disclosure and to format the article for publication.
Photo by Oluwaseyi Akinlolu on Unsplash.
Continue reading...
As medical students, we are often confined to a repetitive cycle that defines much of our four years: studying, eating, barely sleeping, and then studying even more. We learn early to push through exhaustion and to treat our own well-being as something that can wait until after the next exam, the next board score, the next milestone. Somewhere along the way, many of us begin to believe that slowing down is the same thing as falling behind. I believed that too, until my own health forced me to learn otherwise.
Before matriculating into medical school, I was diagnosed with a chronic condition that would ultimately require multiple surgeries over several years. Rather than prioritizing treatment, I did what so many students do: I postponed. There was always another prerequisite, another interview, another reason why my health could wait. Once medical school began, I continued pushing through, attending lectures, preparing for board examinations, and maintaining the appearance of functioning normally while quietly managing pain, recurrent complications, and fatigue behind the scenes.
I convinced myself this was what commitment looked like. I feared that acknowledging my limitations would mean jeopardizing the future I had worked so hard to build.
Eventually, my body made the decision for me. Shortly after undergoing another procedure timed carefully around my board examinations, I developed a serious postoperative complication that landed me in the intensive care unit. In a single day, I went from pre-studying for my upcoming rotations to fighting for far more than my place in a class rank. Waking up in that ICU bed, surrounded by my family and the team caring for me, I was forced to confront a truth I had spent nearly a decade avoiding: I could no longer put medicine ahead of my own health.
For the first time in my journey toward becoming a physician, I took a medical leave of absence.
The physical recovery was long, but the emotional recovery was in many ways harder. While I healed at home, I watched classmates progress through rotations and celebrate milestones I had expected to share alongside them. Like many students who step away, I struggled with isolation, guilt, and the quiet fear that I had somehow failed. After years of sacrifice to earn my seat in medical school, feeling left behind was devastating in a way I had never anticipated.
But those months of recovery gave me something medical school never had: time to reflect. Somewhere in that stillness, I came to a realization that changed how I view this profession. Medical school is only a small chapter in what I hope will be a long career. My path looked different from the paths of those around me, but different does not mean failure. If I was going to fight my way through this chapter, I wanted my experience to serve a greater purpose than my own recovery.
That conviction became the foundation for Pause With a Purpose, an organization I am now building to support students and professionals across medicine who are navigating serious illness, mental health challenges, caregiving responsibilities, burnout, or other life-altering circumstances during their training and careers. The mission is simple: to create the kind of support system I wish I had during the most difficult moments of my own journey, and to help erase the stigma that surrounds stepping away.
Even in these early stages, the need has been impossible to ignore. As I began speaking openly about my experience, I was surprised by how many people quietly shared stories remarkably similar to my own. I heard from students who took leaves to address depression and burnout, trainees recovering from cancer treatment and major surgery, and colleagues who stepped away to care for family members or navigate personal crises. The circumstances varied, but the underlying fear was almost always the same: the belief that taking time away from training would permanently define them.
Often, these individuals did not need solutions. They simply needed someone willing to listen and to remind them that they were not alone. That is the community Pause With a Purpose exists to build.
Medicine’s culture of self-sacrifice runs deep. From the earliest stages of training, we are praised for perseverance and endurance, and those traits have real value, but they become dangerous when they teach future physicians that asking for help is weakness, or that personal well-being is secondary to professional achievement. We would never advise our patients to ignore serious illness in order to remain productive, yet many of us hold ourselves to precisely that standard.
My leave of absence taught me what I wish I had understood much earlier: taking a pause is not failure. In fact, stepping away may be one of the most responsible decisions a trainee can make when facing significant health challenges. Becoming a physician is not a race, and the goal of training should never be to identify who can endure the most suffering. It should be to develop healthy, compassionate, resilient physicians capable of caring for others over the course of a lifetime.
Today, I have returned to clinical rotations stronger than I have been in years, and I am preparing for my Level 2 board examinations while continuing to develop Pause With a Purpose alongside my training. I never imagined that my journey into medicine would also make me an advocate for the people within it. Yet after everything this chapter has taught me, I know that this work will remain part of my career long after my training ends.
To any student quietly struggling behind the scenes, your health is not a detour from your future in medicine. It is the foundation of it. Taking a pause did not derail my journey toward becoming a physician. It helped save it, and it gave that journey a purpose larger than myself.
Conflict of interest disclosure
The author is the founder of Pause With a Purpose, an organization discussed in this article.
AI use
AI assistance was used to draft the abstract and conflict of interest disclosure and to format the article for publication.
Photo by Oluwaseyi Akinlolu on Unsplash.
Continue reading...
