He was putting in 12-hour days, then coming home and wanting only to decompress. The children were there. So was his wife. But George P. Naum, III, DO, Family Practice, was somewhere else entirely. "I was lost in 12 hr days at the office and the hospital," he recalls, "and then I came home wanting to do nothing more than to de-stress from the day." It was a pattern that, left unaddressed, would have quietly hollowed out his family life while his professional one carried on.
What stopped it was not a crisis in the clinical sense. It was a conversation. His wife told him she needed help with their children, and he credits her directness with opening his eyes to a distance he had not yet fully registered in himself. "Her courage in confronting me about needing help with our kids," he says, "allowed me to prevent the distance that was obviously occurring between myself and them." He describes the result simply: strong relationships, and a genuine place in his children's lives.
That reckoning points to something physicians rarely discuss publicly: the gap between knowing, in the abstract, that family requires presence, and actually noticing when you have stopped providing it. Naum is candid about the fact that the demands of modern medical practice extend well beyond patient contact hours. His children grew up understanding that their father spent his days caring for people, but he acknowledges they never fully grasped the additional time that the current state of medicine quietly consumes around the edges of that work.
"My kids have always known what I do during the day regarding taking care of people and how much time that takes. I don't think they've ever fully grasped the ancillary time that has been required in the state of medicine today."
For Naum, the throughline from that early moment of reckoning runs toward a single conviction about regret. Not professional regret, the kind that shows up in outcome data or malpractice filings, but the quieter kind that accumulates over decades of school pickups missed and dinners eaten alone. "As we age," he says, "it is the lack of, and subsequent loss of, spending time with family and friends that we regret. We can never get that time back."
The warning carries particular weight coming from someone whose professional identity is built around helping patients manage the consequences of choices made too late. For physician-parents, the question Naum leaves hanging is not whether the career is worth it. It is whether anyone is paying close enough attention to notice when the answer at home has already started to change.
