Who am I without my white coat?

Career transition, identity loss, and reconstruction

I heard the pop. The minute it happened, I knew I’d torn basically every ligament in my knee.

I knew this would be a career-ending injury.

Let’s back up.

The knee broke in January 2021, at the height of the pandemic. Three years before that, I’d been ranked the best ninja warrior athlete in my age range—in the entire nation.

Ninja warrior was my identity. Yes, I was a doctor and an academic. But where I really came alive was on the ninja course. Heck, I’d even changed my instagram handle to ninjasurgeon.

But then a pandemic, a dissolving marriage, and toxic job deteriorated my ninja skills. As 2020 flipped over to 2021, my new year’s resolution was to get those skills back.

The problem was: I was nearing the end of my forties. Which meant that, although my deconditioned muscles remembered what to do, they were too weak to do it.

Also my ligaments had become porcelain.

Objectively, the fall that destroyed my knee wasn’t that bad. I fell less than three feet, from an obstacle I’d done hundreds of times before—an obstacle I was confident in; an obstacle that didn’t scare me (like most of them did).

But that evening, my body went one direction, my leg went the other