I Became a Pediatrician Because I Wanted to Be a Good Adult

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drped Aug 19, 2026

I grew up somewhere between discipline and abuse. During my internship, a boy a little over three years old came into the emergency department with abdominal pain. He was drowsy, his pupils were dilated, and he sat hunched over in a way that bothered me immediately. He looked like a puppy that had been kicked. His mother had stepped away to buy him a toy. I don’t know exactly how I knew. I just did. When I called the pediatric resident, I told him I suspected child abuse. It turned out that I was right. Later he asked me how I had known, and I couldn’t give him an answer. That was when I decided to become a pediatrician. I remember thinking that if I became a pediatrician, maybe I could become a good adult. Everyone already knew pediatrics was not a specialty you chose to get rich. The work was hard, the financial rewards were modest, and there were much easier ways for a doctor to make a living. That didn’t matter much to me. I thought the work was important. My first year of residency was exhausting. I barely left the hospital. That winter, a 19-year-old boy with cerebral palsy died after repeated aspiration pneumonia. I had spent much of that year caring for him. His mother had spent almost his entire life doing the same. Nineteen years. You might think that after that long, after so much illness, a parent would be prepared for the possibility of death. She wasn’t. When he died, she cried just like every other parent I had seen lose a child. I had first heard that kind of crying during my internship. A six-year-old boy had been brought into the emergency department after a car accident. He was already dead when he arrived. We kept doing CPR while we waited for his family. I knew they had arrived before anyone told me. I heard the sound from the entrance. It was almost animal. I remember thinking, Can a human being really make that sound? Later, after I had spent more time in pediatrics, I heard it again. And again. Parents do not get used to losing children. A child does not become less precious because he has been sick for years. That realization did something to me. I started believing that every child had to be saved. Not most of them. Every one. I wanted to believe that if I worked hard enough, moved fast enough, thought carefully enough, I could somehow make that happen. For a while, that belief gave me a great deal of pride. Then children kept dying. Miracles happened in dramas. They didn’t happen very often in my hospital. Every time a child died, something stayed with me. Part of it was the parents’ grief. Part of it was the feeling that I had failed them. As I became more experienced, the patients I cared for became sicker and the decisions became harder. Sometimes, after a death, the questions became legal complaints. Then every decision was examined afterward. Why did you do this then? Why did you wait? Why wasn’t another treatment tried? Why wasn’t someone called sooner? I knew why the parents were asking. They had lost a child. But sitting there while every minute of what I had done was taken apart, I sometimes felt less like the doctor who had tried to save the child and more like the person accused of killing one. At first, I became angry. I blamed the system. I blamed society. Sometimes, if I’m being truthful, I was angry with the parents too. There were moments when I wanted to say: I was there. I was awake. I was running between patients. I was making the decisions. I was trying to save your child. Apart from you, who wanted that child to live more than I did? But what could I actually say to parents whose child was dead? Arguing about fairness felt obscene. So most of the anger stayed inside. Over time I became anxious, sensitive and exhausted. I started thinking of myself as a victim, and then I hated myself for thinking that way. Eventually I decided that I wasn’t suited to work that involved saving lives. So I left pediatrics. I later came back. Today I run a small pediatric practice. The work is much less dramatic. Most of the children I see are not critically ill. I treat ordinary illnesses, follow children as they grow, answer parents’ questions and try to deal with problems before they become serious. There are no miracles. A child gets sick. I treat the child. The child gets better and goes home. I’ve learned to appreciate that. What still bothers me is how many people who seemed better suited to pediatrics than I was never came back. Pediatrics used to attract people who really loved the work. I had a friend who would make rounds over and over because he wanted to see the kids again. Another would spend days off buying little things and bringing them back to the ward. Some of them seemed born to be pediatricians. They were better than me in ability and, I thought, in character. They left. I came...

I Became a Pediatrician Because I Wanted to Be a Good Adult

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