Supporting Physician Spouses

They're tired. They're stressed. They can't control their schedule. If you're married to a physician, nobody had to teach you that list. You've probably said some version of it to yourself this week. Maybe in the car. Maybe lying awake. Here's the part nobody says out loud. All of it can be true, and medicine still doesn't get to be the excuse for how you're treated. I sat down with Erika Beck to...

I found something I wrote years ago, during my husband's neurosurgery residency. I'd titled it "I Was Made for This." "I am a rock," it begins. "I am the solid foundation in my family's life... the glue that keeps our family running on schedule and on time, bills paid, and food on the table." I believed every word. I thought I'd stumbled onto a secret, that my personality was just strangely, perfe...

A woman in my community messaged me a few weeks ago. She wasn't asking for herself. She wanted to know if I knew a coach for her husband. I get that message more than you'd think. You find your way to support, something starts to shift, and almost right away you look across the kitchen at the man you married and think... he needs this too. I know that feeling. I've told my own husband I'd love for...

My daughters picked their Halloween costumes weeks ago. Now they're just counting down. Trunk or treats. School carnivals. Every chance to be someone else for a few hours, and they commit to it completely. Then the night ends and the costume comes off. They climb into bed exactly who they were that morning. Nobody has to remind them who they are. They never forgot. Watching them this year, I kept...

The first thing Katie told me was that she now finishes her workout at the time her family used to have to be in the car. That one detail told me a lot had changed. Katie Harris, my former co-host, came back on so we could catch up. The last time we talked was in May. She was working at the college and asking herself everything. Should I keep working when Talon starts his job? Should I go part-tim...

I said it out loud for the first time in the car, and the car stopped. We had just moved to Texas. I turned to my husband and said, "I think something's off with us." He hit the brakes right there in the middle of the road. (Adrian remembers pulling over. He did not.) His reaction made sense. We did all the right things. We were good to each other, we liked each other, we had good kids. On paper,...

She built the whole case before she asked her question. A few weeks ago, a listener left a comment on one of my Instagram posts, and I haven't been able to put it down. She listed the recitals and games her husband missed. The 100 thankless hours a week. His prime 30s, gone to seven years of residency. The way medicine turned him into a cog answering to people who have no idea what his job costs h...

My guest, Viola Enns Woelk, has spent the last few years studying, and living. Viola spent years as a nurse before life circumstances led her to give up her licence. No nursing shortage in Canada at the time, her husband working eighty and ninety hour weeks, no family nearby to catch the kids on short notice. On paper, it was simply a practical decision. Underneath it, it was a loss she carried qu...

Kayla's husband promised her he wouldn't be a surgeon. Then he promised he wouldn't be one of the hard ones. Then he became an orthopaedic surgeon. If you laughed and winced at the same time just now, you're in the right place. I sat down with Kayla MacNeille, physician spouse, mother of three and debut novelist, to talk about the parts of this life nobody warns you about. She met her husband in u...

The week we recorded this episode, Christina Musgrave's washing machine, dishwasher, and refrigerator were all broken. The dog was sick. Her daughter was starting school. Her husband had been on call for what felt like forever. She was in her first trimester with their second baby. She still made dinner. That detail has stayed with me. Not because it's impressive, though it is, but because it says...

There's a version of physician wellness we've all quietly accepted. The physician finds something that fills them back up. Golf. The gym. A solo trip somewhere. And the family waits for them to come home. Nobody's wrong for needing that. But nobody's talking about what it costs the spouse who's been home all week, holding everything together, watching the car back out of the driveway on a Saturday...

The Lindsay Clancy case opened a lot of important conversations. I was inside one of them last week, talking about the maternal mental health side of what happened. Today I want to stay inside the same story and move to a different part of the room. Patrick Clancy has filed a civil malpractice suit against the physicians who cared for Lindsay. Somewhere, in houses nobody is talking about, the spou...

A woman who did everything the system tells you to do... reached out early, trusted her providers, brought every insider advantage a medical family has to the table... and it still nearly wasn't enough. When Emily E. Johnson's son was born in 2023, her husband was finishing his fourth year of medical school. Between the two of them, they had more healthcare literacy than most families walking thro...

My kids went back to school on August 13th. I know it feels a little early, but that is our reality. And over the next few weeks, my college kids head back too, which means our household is going from seven people to four in a matter of weeks. Some days I'm looking forward to it. Some days I'm dreading it. The dread isn't about the quiet. It isn't about missing them, though I will. It's about the...

On June 26th, 2014, I stopped writing. I know the date because I looked it up. What I didn't need to look up was the feeling I had when I closed that laptop. For years I had been writing to women who were a season or two behind me on this road. Writing about arrival like it was a destination. Writing about the finish line with genuine hope, because I had it. I wasn't performing it. I believed it....

There is a word Aditi Pemmaraju refuses to use. "Trailing spouse." She won't say it. She says "lighthouse spouse" instead, and by the end of this conversation, I think you'll understand exactly why. Aditi met her husband in calculus class freshman year of college. He was all in on pre-med from day one. She was still finding her way, and she told me with a laugh that she still kind of is. Over the...

There was a stretch of residency when I couldn't tell you what month it was without checking my phone. The days just bled into each other. Getting the kids up, breakfast, nap time, pickup, dinner, bedtime, and then the same thing again. I was physically present in my life, doing everything that needed to be done, and I was completely, quietly gone. For years I told myself I was a homebody. An intr...

When we're deep in the hard seasons, we invest so much imagination in what's missing, what we don't have just yet, what life will look like on the other side. We almost never turn that same imagination toward the woman we're actually becoming while we wait. And here's what nobody warns you about: she doesn't just show up on the other side, fully formed, rested, and ready to receive the life you bu...

That gap, between how capable you are and how out of control your money feels, is exactly where James lives professionally. He's a fee-only fiduciary who works specifically with physician families. We started with the basics, why money is the number one household stress for most American families and why none of us were ever taught how to actually talk about it. But it moved fast into something de...

Three posts landed in my feed within a few days of each other. None of them were mine to write, but I couldn't stop thinking about how all three were describing women. If you see your spouse as a paycheck and he sees you as a role, you don't have a marriage. You have a transaction, and a transaction is the shallowest version of a relationship there is. I went looking at what the Harvard Study of A...

Someone looked at my kitchen and decided my inner life was solved. I've been thinking about that comment for a long time now, the way I do with the strange ones that cross my feed. Because it said something true about how we think about problems. What counts as one. Who gets to have one. And what it means when the house looks finished but something inside still doesn't feel right. I know that gap...

The quiet, invisible weight of living a life that looks charmed from the outside while you quietly hold it all together from the inside. That is where Hayley Harlock and I found each other, somewhere around 2018, sliding into each other's DMs because we were both building something for a community that most people hadn't even recognized as a community yet. Hayley is the founder of The Flipside Lif...

There is a comment I have been turning over in my mind for about ten years now. I heard it from a woman whose husband had chosen podiatry school over medical school, and the reason she gave has never fully left me. She said that decision was predicated on the fact that he loved his family too much. I have thought about that comment more times than I can count. Because the implication (the one she...

I have this photograph. My husband is lying on the couch in our little medical school house. Textbook open across his chest. Highlighter in hand. Our son, just small, completely out, asleep on him. No idea his dad was studying for an exam that would determine the rest of our lives. I've looked at that photograph more times than I can count. And for a long time, what I saw in it was exhaustion. Unc...

Twenty-eight weeks ago, I sat down in a dentist chair and said yes to something I had been quietly talking myself out of for years. This episode is the whole story and by the end of it, I think you're going to recognise something. Not about teeth. About that thing. The one that's been sitting in the background of your life for longer than you probably want to admit. A few years before that appoint...