The anniversary of a pivot

Last fall I went to Italy as an anniversary trip with my husband. There, I stood before Michelangelo’s David.I’d seen him before—on a trip years ago, when I was still deep in the relentless pace of fertility medicine. Back then, I admired the artistry, the scale, the perfection of form. I remember thinking, yes, it’s impressive, before moving on.This time, I saw him differently.The calm readiness in his stance. The way every muscle seemed alive, yet still. The sense that this was a man caught in the breath before action—grounded, steady, not rushing forward, not shrinking back.Michelangelo’s work hadn’t changed in the years between my visits. But I had.One year ago, when I was not in Florence, I was trying to figure out how to keep going in a career that had started to wear me down to the bone.I didn’t leave fertility medicine because I wanted to. I left because my body and my mind needed me to.Fertility work is both science and emotion at full tilt. The protocols are precise. The technology is exacting. The emotional stakes are towering. My days were filled with couples in the narrow window when hope and biology could still meet. Every decision felt urgent. Every delay had consequences.It was meaningful work, but medicine has a way of teaching us to keep giving long after we’ve reached empty. I told myself I could recover on weekends, or during the occasional vacation, or when things “settled down.” They never did.I ignored the signs in myself that I would have recognized instantly in a patient: fatigue that didn’t lift, concentration that slipped, a shortness in my temper that didn’t feel like me. Medicine trains us to notice deterioration in others and normalize it in ourselves.Read: Dr. Ginevra Mills: Holding loss for what it isBy the time I realized I needed a change, the decision was no longer optional. My health had already made it for me.There was no single day when I “left.” It was months of conversation and hesitation, of weighing what I was walking away from against what I might preserve if I made a change. There was no farewell party, no clean break—just a gradual loosening of my grip on the work I had trained my whole adult life to do in exactly that way.When I finally stepped away, I didn’t have a grand plan. I only knew that the way I’d been practicing was unsustainable, and that I needed to find something I could keep doing without breaking myself.The first months weren’t triumphant. They were strange, disorienting. I had stepped out of a life built on urgency and landed in a space that was suddenly quiet — almost too quiet.Eventually, I began working in hormonal medicine: menopause, perimenopause, PCOS. The science is just as intricate, but the tempo is different. The conversations can breathe.A woman in her late forties sits across from me, telling me she hasn’t felt like herself in years. We trace her story—the sleep disruptions, the migraines, the mood changes, the creeping weight gain. I think about estrogen’s role in her hippocampus, about progesterone and GABA, about insulin resistance and cortisol. But with her, I talk about why these threads connect, and how we can untangle them.The work isn’t easier. But it’s sustainable. And it feeds the part of me that went into medicine in the first place: the part that loves sitting across from someone, holding the complexity for them so they can carry the clarity.What I didn’t expect was the healing that came along the way—changes I didn’t deliberately seek, but that unfolded because I finally prioritized my health, especially my mental health.When you live in constant urgency, your nervous system learns to hold tension as a default. In my new rhythm, I started to notice I was no longer bracing all the time—my shoulders loosened, my jaw unclenched. I could walk into a patient encounter without carrying the residue of the last one.I laughed more easily. My concentration returned. The sense of dread that had crept into my mornings began to lift.It wasn’t that my life suddenly became simple. But my mind had space to repair itself. And in that repair, I found I could be present—not just as a physician, but as a human being—in ways I couldn’t before.The change reminded me of something Michelangelo said about creating David: the figure was always inside the marble—he just removed what wasn’t him.I hadn’t set out to sculpt a new career. My health had forced me to start chipping away at what was breaking me. But in removing what no longer fit, I began to see the outline of a different way forward.By the time we traveled to Italy for our wedding anniversary, I had been living this new life for half a year. Standing in front of David again, I realized why I saw him differently.The first time, I had admired the perfection of the form. This time, I understood the power of the pause—the strength in being poised but not yet moving.That was my year: not the battle, but the moment before. The regrouping. The steadying of my feet. The awareness that the next phase was coming, but it didn’t have to look like what came before.Fertility medicine gave me technical skill, diagnostic precision, and the ability to sit with people in their most vulnerable moments. It also took things I didn’t notice losing until they were gone: the curiosity to follow a patient’s story without rushing, the mental stillness to see the whole person, not just the problem to be solved.This new chapter has given some of that back—and given me pieces I didn’t know I was missing.I can see now that my own healing and my patients’ healing aren’t separate. The space I’ve reclaimed in my mind allows me to be present with them in a way I couldn’t before.Anniversaries are a mirrorOne year ago, I was worn down to the grain, trying to decide what to remove before I collapsed entirely. This year, I see the shape of what remains—not perfect, not finished, but strong enough to stand.If the first year was about chiseling away what was breaking me, the next will be about refinement. About deepening my knowledge. Honing the art of listening closely enough to hear what a patient hasn’t yet found the words to say.I didn’t choose to leave in the way people imagine. I left because I had to. But a year later, I can see that sometimes what begins as survival becomes the start of something more deliberate—something that, with time, begins to feel like your own creation.Michelangelo’s David has stood for over five hundred years, carved from a block of stone abandoned by others. I’m still early in my carving. But on this anniversary, I know I’m working with the right piece of marble.And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: medicine will take as much as we give it. We have to decide—sometimes painfully—when to stop giving it more than it deserves. And when we do, we might find that in saving ourselves, we see the whole world—and our patients—differently too.Dr. Ginevra Mills is a gynecologist and reproductive endocrinologist based in Victoria.

The anniversary of a pivot

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