The starting point of every conversation about improving healthcare should be the needs of patients, and increasingly that is the case – patient satisfaction valuations now form fundamental frameworks for assessing quality of care. We may, however, be paying too little attention to physician satisfaction. Many doctors are struggling with burnout and the contributing factors are complex. Working in under-resourced, intervention-heavy, time-pressured environments is stressful. The responsibility of providing medical care to patients is fundamentally taxing. Additionally, the level of knowledge and expertise required to practice medicine requires personality traits of exactness, which brings its own set of personal challenges. While there is now a wealth of empirical knowledge about this issue, we have a poor qualitative understanding of the singularity of doctors’ experiences of burnout. In this chapter we investigate doctors’ autobiographical accounts published online. Using a dialogic/performative mode of analysis, which is chiefly concerned with narrative as a form of communication with others, we undertake a close reading of three personal essays. Rather than seek to identify commonalities across these stories, we engage with the individual sets of events, the unique perspectives and the idiosyncrasies of language these writers use in asking us to care for our carers.