I was recently speaking to a close friend and she remarked “I feel like residency made you stop writing.” I was initially caught off guard, but as I reflected further, I remembered a quote I recently read from one of my colleague’s pieces — “a writer either doesn’t write because she has nothing to write about, or too much to write about. For me, it has been the latter.”**
For those who don’t know, residency is an essentially required period of medical training in a chosen specialty that doctors go through after graduating from medical school. Residents often work around 80 hours a week, sometimes for over 24 hours at a time. And in some ways, residency did make me stop writing.