From Army Medic to Physician
The Army came into my life while I was still figuring out exactly where medicine was going to take me.
In 1984, I joined the Army Reserve as a combat medic. By then I had already spent time working in EMS, so some of the medical side was familiar. The setting was different. In civilian EMS, you responded when somebody called for help. In the Army, medicine existed inside something larger: a unit, a mission, a chain of command, and a group of people who depended on one another.
Being the medic carried a particular kind of responsibility. You were one of the people everyone expected to know what to do when something went wrong. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you knew enough to recognize that the situation was getting beyond you. Learning the difference was probably as important as anything else.
At the same time, I was attending college, working EMS shifts, doing Army weekends, and fitting in studying wherever I could. It was busy, but it made sense to me. I liked medicine, I liked the Army, and I liked being useful.
Three years later, in 1987, I was commissioned through ROTC. I had entered the Army as an enlisted medic; now I was an officer. The responsibilities changed, but one lesson carried over very clearly: leadership is not the same thing as being the person with the highest rank or the most education.
People pay attention to whether you show up. They notice whether you know your job, whether you stay calm when things become difficult, and whether you are willing to do the things you expect other people to do.
Those lessons followed me into medicine.
Eventually, becoming a physician required a choice. Medical school was going to demand everything I had, so I left the Army and went to Florida. That was not an easy decision. The Army had become part of who I was, and I enjoyed the sense of purpose that came with putting on the uniform. But sometimes moving toward one thing means temporarily leaving something else behind.
I attended Nova Southeastern University and graduated from medical school in 1992. Then came internship and residency.
Medical training is a strange transition. You spend years trying to get into medicine, and then suddenly medicine takes over almost every waking hour. There is always another patient, another admission, another call, another chart, another thing you don't know yet. Somewhere in the middle of all that, you realize people have started calling you "Doctor."
That takes a little getting used to.
The science was deeper now, the consequences were greater, and the decisions were more complicated. But the basic process still felt familiar. A patient tells you what is happening. You listen, examine them, look at the available evidence, decide what fits and what doesn't, and make the best decision you can with the information you have. Then you remain willing to change it when new information arrives.
My medical career began in South Carolina and later brought me back to Michigan. Over the years, I moved through different areas of medicine and eventually became heavily involved in pain management and addiction treatment.
There was still one part of my earlier life that I missed: the uniform. Years after leaving the Army, I found another way to serve and joined the Civil Air Patrol, first as a pilot and eventually as a squadron commander.
Looking back, the transition from Army medic to physician doesn't feel like two separate careers. It feels like one road. The Army taught me that responsibility is something you earn every day. Medicine taught me that knowledge is never finished.
Both taught me something I still believe: you don't have to know everything. But you do have to know what you don't know — and what to do next.