The Door I Didn’t Choose

I didn’t choose general practice. I’d spent years building a career in another part of medicine, and when that path closed to me — after more near-misses and shut doors than I care to count — I came to general practice because I had run out of anywhere else to go. I arrived quietly defeated, certain I was settling for something smaller than the work I’d trained my whole life for.

It took a few months before I understood how wrong I had been.

Everything walks through that door. The undifferentiated, the frightening, the ordinary that turns out not to be ordinary at all — and you are the one who has to know what to do with it. There is no narrow field to retreat into, no one further down the corridor to hand it to. Slowly it stopped feeling like the thing I’d ended up with, and started feeling like the most complete medicine there is. What a privilege, I realised, to be the person someone comes to first.

I fell in love with it. I just never expected to.