Lifelines
“If my baby’s meant to die, that’s what God would want.” “I understand,” I told the young woman, the new mom, the little girl I’d known since the days the toys inside the treasure chest could make her smile. “But it’s not as simple as that.” “I don’t want...
Hydrops Fetalis
A blank screen as a post? A cardboard sign with three letters? Maybe I could hold it up at a rally? March through the streets and let someone else chants the words? Or perhaps there’s a story? One that speaks of the injustice still inside us, the villainy that...
My Drummer Has Asperger’s
I think my drummer has Asperger’s. Don’t get me wrong. I love the man. It wouldn’t be too far a stretch, in fact, to call him one of my best friends. But in a contingent sort of way. Like the way I call my wife the...
Shattered Silence
Three days of silence. The world set to mute. It happened so fast. On the heels of so much else. That’s how I knew. But still, how to tell him? This man here for hope. This man that was going...
Moseley
Nelson makes the best stir fry. I remember the first time he knocked on the call room door, a few years back, when he was still new. He wore a doo rag that tied behind his ears, round glasses with silver rims, and that easy smile that seems a birthright of every man,...
The Gift of Corona
Life as I knew it changed when I wrapped my knee around that tree, exactly 3 weeks before the first two Coronavirus cases hit Kauai. “I need your help,” I yelled, with more panic in my voice than a good dad would want his son to hear. The boy unbuckled my snowboard’s...
All Bleeding Stops
All Bleeding Stops is a study of two contrasting characters, the driving forces behind choice, and the internal conflicts that drive them each to their breaking points. Rob McIntosh is a wealthy Wall Street investor and inventor who revels in the limitless luxuries of extreme wealth and success but is haunted by his past regrets. Steve Rogoff is a cutting-edge physician, surfer, and family man who enjoys a dream life until he is blamed for the death of one of his patients. All Bleeding Stops examines the sordid underbelly of the today’s narcotic epidemic, explaining the factors that drive it from the perspectives of both the addict and, uniquely, the physician. The exploration is both vulnerable and illuminating, paralleling the build up of stresses and their eventual break points that are common to both characters, and the wicked temptation of release that offers a welcome elixir to the tormenting pain.
All Bleeding Stops is a nod to the common adage taught to all physicians that, given enough time, an injured patient will eventually stop bleeding in one of two ways: either from the physician’s successful interventions that will save his life or from the patient’s exsanguination and resultant death. It is part memoir and part fiction, exploring the themes of free will versus fatalism, the confusion of conditioning and inertia with true choice, and the complex factors that lead a man along his path. So too does it examine the common human condition that afflicts us all, the moral duality of the good and the bad that lives in each of us and the thin veil that separates them. It is a tale of compassion and guilt, responsibility and it’s potential opportunities and burdens, and how easily lives of perfection come crashing down. One choice can separate all that exists before from a diametrically bipolar opposite, luminous bliss from the lightless depths of addiction and withdrawal. More often than we would like to admit, our emotional weaknesses and imperfections of character will eventually percolate up from wherever we keep them hidden, come to the light, and alter our course in a way akin to destiny. Whereas before we would pejoratively castigate those others from within of our glass houses, only after we too are bucked by life’s relentless beatings do we recognize the transparency as in fact a mirror, those weaknesses as our own, their imperfect images as ourselves. If the tables were turned, are we so sure that we would make such different choices than those we judge and critique with such thoughtless ease? And, is life truly a series of conscious choices or are we in fact slaves to forces much greater than ourselves, gravitational bodies caught up by the inertia of all things before?
All Bleeding Stops neutralizes judgment by equating good with bad, addict with physician, and choice from fate, explaining today’s opiate epidemic not as society’s ill to be cured but instead as a necessary anti-climax to the breaking points that the stresses of today’s world drive us toward. It both compassionately rationalizes the addict’s choice to use as it does dethrone the physician as omnipotent benevolent, thus freeing him from his complicit role. In equating the powerful with the powerless, All Bleeding Stops shows both addict and the physician that prescribes as two faces of the same imperfect condition that is humanity.
About Steve
Steve Rogoff is a family physician and author who lives in Kauai with his wife and 3 children. Raised in Los Angeles and graduated with honors from Berkeley, he began writing more intensely while living in South America during a gap year between medical studies at UC San Diego. It was there he found his voice, writing two collections of short stories, Colors and Shadows and the unpublished Dark Side of the Light, as well as his first novel, Nazca.
Upon returning from his first sabbatical, his writing took a back seat to the art of medicine, completing his medical degree and then his residency in Family Medicine at UC San Francisco’s rural program in Santa Rosa. Unsettled by the wine country’s long winters, month-long rains, and icy predator-laden surf, he altered his course for Hawaii. Without a job or a desire to land one, he moved to Kauai after his graduation in 2002 with his then-fiancée. His plan: to get married, find a “hut,” and distance himself from medicine and build a more simple and humble life. Dr. Rogoff joined Hale Le’a Medicine on the north shore where his future partner offered him to work when the clinic would otherwise have been closed, on Saturdays from 9-1. Those simple years were filled with daily surfs and “cookouts” with the Poipu locals, playing guitar at sunset kanikapila, and realizing a simple life in a single wall home next door to a Pomeranian and Chihuaha breeding ground run by a meth addict whose 2am domestic disturbances would wake the pack and set off a canine cacophony. Yapping aside, life was simple and sweet.
As the years passed, his physician responsibilities grew to become medical director and work full time at the clinic. These were his “years in the trenches,” hustling with the energy and idealism of youth through 30- and 40- patient days, all the while studying the idiosyncrasies and common condition of humanity. Meanwhile, he worked as one of 6 full-time physicians covering the Emergency Room on the neighbor island of Molokai, flying over ever other Sunday and working 72 hour shifts until Wednesday. A striking contrast soon became evident. Western medicine strengths were highlighted in the acute setting of the ER with it’s heart attacks, broken bones, asthma flares, and machete cuts. But the same paradigm faltered in the chronic care model of the clinic where patients were not so sick to be dying but sick enough to be unhappy, uncomfortable, fatigued, and faltering. With time, he became disillusioned by western medicine’s inability to care for anything but the sickest of patients, its commercial dependence on pharmaceuticals, and it’s impotence in treating chronic conditions in sustainable ways. Over the next decade, he immersed himself in integrative medicine, studying Anti-Aging and then Functional Medicine, eventually receiving his fellowship in both.
Armed with the knowledge of recognizing the root-causes beneath patients’ conditions, he succeeded in helping countless patients over the two decades of his early career. But it was quickly becoming apparent that something was missing, the healing of himself. It was then that Dr. Rogoff found a voice inside that had been dormant for too long, his passion for writing.
In 2018, Steve Rogoff did the unthinkable. He took a sabbatical year, pushing pause on doctoring and dedicating his time, instead, to crafting words and telling tales. It was not an easy decision, to escape to the shores of medicine’s river whose current rushed so fiercely. He walked away from his beautiful home, successful career, his friends forged over 16 years, his time-honed surf spots and well-worn bike paths, and his 15-year-old band that had yet to play a gig. Setting his sites on somewhere ill-defined in Spain, he journeyed into the unknown. It was not the first time the once-young doctor escaped life by hitting the road. A year in South America, a summer in India, a homemade boat to explore the Amazon basin, and shorter strike-force missions to Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Indonesia and music festivals on multiple occasions peppered life with enough of a release to recharge him to sustain more drudgings. But this time was different. This release needed amplification. And this time, in tow, he dragged his family into the unknown.