From medic to patient

21 April 2026 From medic to patient For nine years, I ran toward emergencies. Israeli Red Cross, 1998 to 2006. Eight years of showing up when ever

21 April 2026 From medic to patient For nine years, I ran toward emergencies.

Israeli Red Cross, 1998 to 2006. Eight years of showing up when everything had gone wrong and making it go less wrong. I knew how to stabilise a patient, clear an airway, stop bleeding, keep someone alive until better help arrived.

Then I became the patient.

Not gradually. Not with warning. One day I was the person who saves lives. The next, I was the person lying in the bed wondering if anyone could save mine.

That inversion broke something in me. And then it rebuilt something better.

When you've been trained to assess, diagnose, and act — and then you find yourself on the other side of the assessment, being diagnosed and acted upon — you see things that nobody else sees. You see how the system works from above and from below simultaneously.

I could tell when a doctor was uncertain but performing confidence. I recognised the body language of someone who'd already made up their mind before the examination started. I knew when a test was ordered to rule something out rather than to find something. Because I'd done all of those things myself, to other people, hundreds of times.

That knowledge should have helped me. In some ways it did. I could advocate for myself in medical language. I could read my own charts. I could spot the gaps.

But in other ways, it made everything worse. Because I also knew how badly I was being failed. I could see the systemic problems — not just experience them. I knew that the doctor dismissing my symptoms wasn't malicious. They were undertrained, overworked, and operating inside a system that rewards speed over curiosity. I understood the mechanism of my own abandonment.

That's a specific kind of pain. When you can see exactly why nobody's helping you, and you can't fix it.

The clinical knowledge I'd built as a medic became both my greatest tool and my heaviest burden. The tool part: I eventually used it to self-diagnose. To understand my own condition