The Day I Became My Own Grief Patient

There are moments in every physician’s career when medicine ceases to be an intellectual exercise.

You stop being the doctor.

You become the patient.

For me, that moment came when my sixteen-year-old son, Galen, was killed in a tragic train accident.

Nothing in medical school prepares you for burying your own child.

There are no lectures on how to wake each morning into a reality your nervous system refuses to accept. No textbook explains what it feels like when every cell in your body longs for someone who no longer exists in physical form. There is no prescription for the silence that follows.

I discovered very quickly that grief is not merely an emotion.

It is biology.

It is neurochemistry.

It is attachment with nowhere to go.

When the Physician Meets the Father

Long before Galen died, I had been working with a fascinating neuropeptide called oxytocin.

Most people know oxytocin as the “love hormone” or the hormone released during childbirth, breastfeeding, and intimate human connection. That description barely scratches the surface.

As a physician, I had used bioidentical intranasal oxytocin in carefully selected patients for years.

Some children with autism became calmer and more socially connected.

Some adults recovering from traumatic brain injury experienced less anxiety and agitation, particularly as hyperbaric oxygen therapy restored enough brain function for them to recognize the extent of their own disabilities. Ironically, becoming more aware of one’s deficits can initially be emotionally overwhelming.

Oxytocin often helped.

So while I was already familiar with the molecule professionally, I had never imagined I would one day become my own most important case study.

A Strange Observation

About three weeks after Galen’s death, something happened that lasted only a fraction of a second.

A fleeting sexual thought crossed my mind.

Nothing more.

Yet almost instantly I noticed something remarkable.

My grief softened.

Not disappeared.

Not healed.

But modulated.

The effect lasted only moments, but it was unmistakable.

As both a grieving father and a physician, I immediately asked myself the only question that mattered:

Why?

An Old Memory Returned

Years earlier I had watched a documentary about prisoners who had been tortured during the Second World War.

One survivor described how, during torture, he mentally revisited intimate memories of women he had loved.

At the time I thought it was an extraordinary psychological coping mechanism.

Now I wondered if there was something deeper occurring.

Sexual thoughts are not simply thoughts.

They trigger one of the most powerful attachment neurochemical systems in the human brain.

Oxytocin.

Perhaps that survivor had unknowingly discovered a biological strategy that helped blunt overwhelming psychological pain.

Perhaps my own experience was pointing in the same direction.

Becoming My Own Patient

I called a compounding pharmacy and obtained intranasal oxytocin.

Then I did what physicians sometimes do when there are no studies answering the question in front of them.

I carefully observed.

The results surprised me.

On my own entirely subjective scale, where the best flower essences I had tried for grief rated perhaps a one out of ten, oxytocin was closer to a nine.

It did not erase my grief.

Nothing could.

Nor would I have wanted it to.

Grief is love.

To erase grief would be, in some sense, to erase love itself.

What oxytocin seemed to do was something different.

It reduced the overwhelming anxiety, emotional pain, and physiological suffering enough that I could breathe again.

Even more interesting, I found I needed it less and less.

After roughly two weeks, I stopped using it altogether.

The intensity had changed.

The grief remained.

But I no longer felt engulfed by it.

What Is Grief?

Modern medicine often treats grief as though it exists entirely within psychology.

I have never believed that is the whole story.

Love creates attachment.

Attachment is mediated, at least in part, through biology.

If attachment has biology, why would bereavement not also have biology?

Why would we expect the brain to lose one of its deepest human bonds without measurable neurochemical consequences?

These are not unreasonable questions.

They deserve to be asked.

Why I Built GriefSOS.com

Within a week I created GriefSOS.com.

I wasn’t selling oxytocin.

I wasn’t selling supplements.

I wasn’t building a business.

I simply wanted the information to exist.

If another grieving parent found themselves searching the internet at two in the morning—as grieving people so often do—I wanted them to know there might be another conversation worth having with a knowledgeable physician.

Not because I possess all the answers.

But because I had become one of the people asking the questions.

A Century Too Early?

Throughout my career I have often found myself interested in ideas long before they became mainstream.

Sometimes those ideas eventually found acceptance.

Sometimes they did not.

Time will decide whether oxytocin has an important place in helping some grieving individuals or whether my own experience proves to be an exception rather than the beginning of a larger understanding.

I genuinely do not know.

What I do know is this.

Three weeks after my son died, my own brain revealed something unexpected.

The scientist in me paid attention.

The physician in me investigated.

The father in me was grateful.

Perhaps one day, grief medicine will include not only compassion, counseling, and time, but a deeper appreciation for the neurobiology of attachment itself.

If that day comes, wonderful.

If it doesn’t, then at least one grieving father left behind an observation that future generations are free to test, challenge, refine—or even prove wrong.

That is, after all, how medicine is supposed to advance.

Not through certainty.

But through careful observation, intellectual honesty, and the courage to ask questions no one else seems to be asking.