In Balance: A Family Affair

Mark Weadon doesn’t remember his father playing a lot of ball with him in the backyard when he was a kid, or many meals with the whole family around the table. He never saw his father putzing around the house on Saturday mornings because Dad, the only neurosurgeon in the Western Michigan area for a quarter century, always worked that day.

What he does remember, though — many times — is being stopped by people who would ask if he were Dr. Weadon’s son. “And they would say, ‘Oh, he saved my son’s life, or my daughter’s life.’ That’s an amazing thing to hear about your father,” Weadon says. “I was and I am very proud.”

Dave Gertler is proud, too, of his wife, Sue Kost — an emergency physician in Wilmington, Del. “I can’t tell you how many times people have come up and said, ‘Oh, [Dr. Kost] sewed up my son,’” he says. “There are worse things than strangers fawning over your wife.”

Still, it isn’t easy for physicians’ spouses and children. What do they have to say about it? And what can you do to make sure the time you have with your family is as good as it can — and needs — to be? Here are some solutions from some of those who know firsthand.

Not just any family

Medical families live in a different world: They deal with inconvenient physician call schedules. They tiptoe around during the day because Mommy put in a 12-hour shift last night. They reschedule Christmas. But what choice do they have? “For other people a bad day at work is you didn’t get a report in on time,” says Gertler. “For [my wife], it can be a child dies.”

Elaine Hale, wife of retired family physician Steve Hale, agrees. “It doesn’t sound quite as noble to say ‘signing contracts,’ instead of ‘saving a life.’” But the privilege of using such goose bump-evoking language doesn’t come free. “We learn right from the start that your family life takes a second priority to the needs of the patient,” she says.

Indeed, as difficult as it is to stay married in the U.S. today, it’s even harder for medical couples.

Some experts estimate the divorce rate for physicians to be 10 percent to 20 percent higher than the general population. Psychiatrists’ and surgeons’ marriages are at particular risk compared to other specialties, reports the landmark Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, which tracked 1,248 subjects who graduated from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (between 1944 through 1960) for 30 years.

So understanding and embracing what you’re getting into is key for medical marriages, on both sides. You don’t want to isolate, ignore, pass over, or dump on your nonphysician spouse. And your spouse must accept that being married to a doctor means being truly flexible about plans; buried resentment won’t stay that way. You both have all the normal challenges of keeping your marriage together, plus the extra impact of your career choice.

How to do this? Be “intentional” about your marriage, says Miranda Horton, an internist who lives with her hospitalist-husband, Kyle, in Greenville, S.C. Seven years post-knot-tying — which occurred before graduation from medical school — the two realized that “all we were doing was going to work and coming home,” she says. Luckily, they’ve now learned to focus more on each other and the state of their marriage. They resist the temptation “to just go to sleep,” says Miranda Horton. Date nights stay as sacrosanct as possible, given the uncertainties of a physician’s job description.

The two struggle to make their schedules coordinate — difficult, she says, but they manage at least one weekend a month to spend together. Because they are both physicians, their challenge is perhaps greater than a one-physician marriage.

Then again, there are actually some advantages to marrying one of your own “kind.” Horton says, “When he calls and he says ‘I’m running late,’ I understand what that means; I’ve reciprocated. … He is a great cheerleader for me, and me for him. We understand the long work hours and how emotionally draining it is.”