My Story

Hi, I'm Daniel, the creator of this blog. I don't even know exactly what I could tell you about myself on this about page. I don't know what kind of information would interest you, or why anyone would even follow my blog. So, out of a lack of imagination, I'm going to try to tell you my life story up to now. Maybe it will bore you, maybe it isn't interesting enough, but this, as it is, is what led me onto the path I'm on now.

I was born in Romania in 1986, into a modest family, and grew up with a brother two years younger than me. My childhood was a happy one, by any standard I can measure it against. At home, the atmosphere was pleasant, and both my brother and I felt loved as children, without ever noticing our parents favor one of us over the other. There were small arguments between my parents, but usually nothing serious, nothing that turned into the fighting and scandals that were, at the time, the standard for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc.

I went to Traian Vuia high school without really knowing why I chose to go there. The only clear connection was that my father had gone there decades earlier. It wasn't very convenient either, since I had to walk a fairly long way to get to school and back home. In the first part of my life, I was a fairly introverted person, shy, timid, the kind who would rather hide under the bed if it came to it than say good morning to the neighbors on the stairwell. I always looked on with admiration at how my father seemed able to crack joke after joke and lighten the mood, or break the ice in any new interaction he had. That self-confidence was something I completely lacked, at first.

As a teenager, I ran into a lot of martial arts movies, the kind most of us were watching back then. You remember all those Jackie Chan movies from his younger years. Like any kid, and especially any boy who saw those incredible images on screen, I wanted to be able to fly through the air just like him. A few years later I saw an Aikido demonstration and decided, right there, to go take a closer look at the dojo. That first contact ended up turning into several years of training in Aikido, Wado Ryu Karate, and Wing Chun Kung Fu. The people I met along the way in those dojos became an important reference point for me. I understood what it means to have self-confidence, not just when you're walking down the street or saying good morning to the neighbor upstairs, but also when you're alone with your own thoughts. I understood that nothing is stronger than the conviction you hold. A conviction that, later on, got me into trouble with my classmates in high school.

I remember being in 11th grade, and during a physics class, almost the whole class, nearly 30 students, decided to leave and skip. I was the only one who stayed in the classroom. I knew it was stupid, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to give up on my convictions. The teacher came in and scolded me, asking how I could be so stupid as to stay, since if everyone else left, I could have just left too, because she surely wasn't going to teach the class for just me. She sent me home. A year later, I barely showed up to certain classes at all, because I was preparing for the medical school entrance exam. Since all the teachers knew that I never skipped class without a good reason, most of them overlooked my absences from certain classes. My issue was never with missing class unexcused, it was that if I did it, it had to be my own choice.

The years of martial arts made me understand how important it is to commit to the values you hold, and even more important, not to lose them under pressure. I remember that at the first Karate class I ever attended, I already had years of discipline behind me from Aikido. It was winter, in December. In Craiova, my hometown, there was about a meter of snow on the streets. Our sensei suggested we go outside wearing only our pants, stripped to the waist, and continue training in the snow. We went out like a bunch of zen monkeys, one after another, and kept training outside for about five minutes. We came back in, changed into dry clothes, and dried ourselves off with towels. Then, standing in front of us, he calmly asked, "What is the strongest weapon you have available to you?" Some answered the fist, others the leg, and I was wondering if we were even allowed to pick the katana, which I knew well from Aikido. He smiled at all of us and answered, slowly: the mind! The most important weapon you will ever have is your mind, your brain, your will. The rest of the body, without the mind, will never do anything on its own. I remember laughing to myself. How could all of us have been so stupid? What he said was so obvious. Twenty-five years have passed since then, but I can still see the expression on his face when he told us that, just as I still remember the feeling of the snowflakes falling on me outside.

I was probably lucky. I probably ran into martial arts at exactly the age when, hit by the teenage crisis, we're all looking for something to identify with. Instead of rebelling like a lot of others do, I chose to commit to some paths that were more or less real, which in the end didn't lead anywhere, since after 10 years of martial arts I gave them up completely, but which played a key role in shaping how I think. I remember watching 50 Cent and Tupac videos as a teenager and trying to process their bad-boy image. I remember not being able to understand why they thought they were tough, I remember thinking to myself that a gymnast who trains 5 hours a day, that's tough. Back then, my own training was daily, hard, and rarely stopped before 2 or 3 hours.

The problem came a few years later, when I started medical school. There was simply no time left for training. And beyond that, I ran directly into conflict with what I actually wanted to do going forward. In my first year of school, I had subjects that were bizarre, if not outright stupid. We studied biochemistry and biophysics. What a waste of time and resources. Even today I remember the biochemistry textbook and how full of nonsense it was. I've always been a pragmatic guy, with visual thinking. As a doctor, it's easier for me to treat and understand clear, real processes, ones involving ruptured vessels and severe trauma, than to remember abstract, mostly theoretical concepts, the kind that dominate neurology, for instance.

After a bitter year of physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics, we were given the chance to choose between an elective course: history of medicine, or first aid. Most of my classmates went for history of medicine, since it was well known that the department head was lenient on exams and didn't cause any real trouble. The head of the emergency medicine department, on the other hand, was the exact opposite, known for being very strict, some even called her crazy. In my mind, though, everything was clear: the history of medicine is something in the past with no relevance to the present, while a doctor who genuinely wants to help patients will always run into a need for first aid training.

After a rough year, learning to organize into resuscitation teams, discussing concrete concepts like heart attacks, trauma, wounds, pneumothorax, and severe hemorrhage, it felt like I could have caught God by the leg. On the final exam I got 9 out of 10, so there were probably other classmates with a higher score than mine, but I was the only one who went to the department head and told her how, for the first time, I finally felt like a doctor, taking part in Basic and Advanced Life Support. I asked her if I could come volunteer in the emergency room, take part in the shifts they were running, and she said yes right away.

For the next 2 years, that's what I did. I went to classes during the day, and 2 or 3 times a week, once on the weekend, Friday or Saturday, and once or twice more during the week, I'd do a 12-hour night shift with them. If I told someone this, nobody would believe me: I'd go in for a shift, unpaid, not required of me at all, at 8pm, and leave in the morning at 6, actually a bit earlier so I'd have time to change, take a shower, eat something at home before heading to class. I had no clear assigned role in the emergency department, but I stuck to the team like a leech. Whatever task they gave me, I tried to carry it out to the best of my ability. After a while the tasks got bigger, I took patient histories, drew blood, read EKGs, took polytrauma patients to radiology for CT scans. I even remember getting into an argument with a radiology assistant who wasn't performing a spinal immobilization carefully enough. At the same time, the department head, who was around 50 and had no children of her own, started joking that I was her kid. That I was always there, that we ate together, worked together. The turning point came a bit later, when she took me along to a year-end exam with the 6th-year students, an exam in emergency medicine. I got to sit with her on the examiners' side. She'd ask the group questions and they'd try to answer. I remember so clearly the looks on their faces. It was obvious, from how they looked, that they didn't know the answers. She asked them something about pathological breathing patterns, Kussmaul, Cheyne-Stokes, and Biot, how they differ, why, and what relevance it has for someone in emergency medicine. Nobody had an answer. What struck me wasn't that they didn't know, since in medicine there are always things you know and things you don't, even I constantly forget what I've learned and reread it and forget it again. What struck me was that, watching from the examiner's seat, it was so obvious they had no clue. I asked myself right then whether, when other professors ask me something and I don't know it, I have that same dumb expression, and whether I'm just as bad at hiding it as they were right now. Their exam, I remember, ended very badly, because at one point she turned to me and just said, "Come on, kid! Explain it to them!" For a second-year student who volunteers in the ER to have to explain, to sixth-years about to finish medical school, something that basic, was embarrassing. I'm not saying I'm somehow better than them, far from that thought. Just that, in that moment, the situation was embarrassing for them. But it did bring me the opportunity, at the end of second year, to teach a practical basic life support session to students a year below me.

At the end of second year, the department head had something unplanned come up on a Friday, so she asked me to fill in for her. When she brought me in front of my classmates, many of whom were friends or acquaintances of mine, and I explained that today I'd be running their practical session, they were happy, thinking they'd get off easy, maybe even leave early. That option, of course, didn't exist for me. I had clearly been given the task of preparing future doctors for resuscitation situations. During that session I met my wife. She caught my attention, along with another classmate of hers, because the two of them were the only ones, out of more than 50 students, who weren't scared to throw themselves onto the dummy, the only ones doing chest compressions with the kind of conviction as if their life depended on it. Like any love story, of course, we spent the next 4 years romantically ignoring each other, until we finally ended up together. Life is strange that way. When I was 20, I had no idea I had just met my wife, and that I was practicing basic life support on a plastic mannequin. Even less did I imagine that, many years later, I would actually resuscitate a real patient with her, in a shock room, as an anesthesiologist.

By my 5th year of medical school, everything seemed fairly clear to me. I would go into emergency medicine and stay in Craiova. But once I got together with her, and she told me she didn't want to stay in the country, all my plans went down the drain. We started learning German from scratch, and in 2012 I left the country. I started a residency in anesthesiology and intensive care medicine in Germany. In my head, it was the only thing I could do that would stay as close as possible to emergency medicine. Somehow, those years spent in the hospital at night, in an emergency department, fit my personality like a glove. And as an anesthesiologist I had a beautiful career, with a lot of medical successes. Looking back, I don't even know if the department head in Craiova sensed that I had everything it took for this field, or if she simply took me on too young and shaped me in her own image, so that this was all I knew how to be. Throughout my whole career, I was happiest when someone was dying next to me, most often in the ER. That kind of hyperacute medicine, where stress and adrenaline tie together and out of that comes the ability to bring patients back to life, is probably the closest feeling to God that you can have. I'm not saying I think I'm God, or that I want to be, just that you become super aware that what you're doing, here and now, matters. That you can help, or you can destroy lives.

In April 2022, our daughter Laura was born. She was the reason I gave up anesthesia and started a second residency, in family medicine. The Covid period was demanding, physically and mentally, but for me, I only have good memories of it. I managed to hold my own in a very competitive team, and brought in skills that were almost unique for a university department. If I had to psychoanalyze myself, I'd say my parents didn't praise me enough as a child, or rather, that they criticized me, and that whatever I did was always not enough. It's the only way I can explain why I loved working 100-hour weeks and having no personal life, just to know I was part of that top 1% of anesthesiologists in the world, who not only work at a major center doing exotic things, but I was proud that I didn't even need an ID badge to walk through the hospital. Doesn't that sound sad? To be there and everywhere so much that a top-level university hospital just knows you?

Well, everything changed for me when Laura was born. My ego somehow went into retirement, and I no longer needed recognition from the people around me. 10 years of intensive care, more than half of them in major university hospitals, trying to lay the groundwork for a career that would take me forward and let me do even more things, things I ended up throwing away and giving up overnight. The exact same thing happened with smoking. From the moment she got pregnant, I quit smoking overnight. On my own, I probably wouldn't have done it, the thought of dying young didn't impress me much. After all, I saw every day how patients younger than me died in some stupid game of karma. Final Destination, you know, has some truth to it. There are patients who go from complication to complication for months and survive, and there are patients with no risk factors at all who die unexpectedly at the smallest problem. And it's not a problem that they die, because these days we have so much equipment available that even death is relative, but that they die in a way where we can't help them at all.

In my mind, I didn't want Laura to grow up without a father, so I quit smoking. And here that same strange pivot kept showing up. I gave up martial arts because I wanted to go volunteer in the ER, and I gave up anesthesia and intensive care because I wanted to see my child and spend as much time as possible with her. That's how, in a wave of what was basically a midlife crisis, we ended up selling our house in northern Germany, both of us switching to family medicine, my wife in the meantime being a neurology specialist who wanted to go into neuroradiology, having just started her second specialty in radiology, and we both left Germany. We landed in France, in Colmar. Why Colmar? I couldn't tell you exactly, probably we just fell in love with the town during one of our visits.

In May 2026, our son Luca was born, so now I have a second reason not to work night shifts anymore. In the meantime I managed to finish my second specialty, in family medicine. And my wife only has a small part left to finish after her maternity leave. What a turn our life has taken. If I explained to the patients I now prescribe paracetamol to, that I used to take in polytrauma patients arriving by helicopter at the university hospital in Frankfurt, and that I now work in a small village on the border with France, nobody would believe me. I can barely believe it myself, that's how big the difference is now. On the other hand, I can tell you that I identify very well with my new role. I feel unexpectedly close to my patients, and I get the sense that they come to see me gladly too. This transition is probably something I should have made a long time ago, but without my daughter, I probably never would have. For a long time, I saw family doctors as people who, due to some shortcoming, weren't able to do another specialty, and never as people who actually wanted this from the start.

I hope I haven't worn you out too much. I've tried to describe to you my path in life, both personal and professional, and I've tried, here and there, to offer you small windows into understanding why I am who I am now.

This blog started from the idea of passing on what I know to the next generations. I'm not saying I hold the absolute truth, but I think I have a say in a lot of things. I'd like for my children to read these lines in 15 to 20 years and form their own opinion about the world around them. That's why it's called The Time Capsule. It's a message meant, someday in the future, for future generations. Laura is 4 now, and Luca is 2 months old. That future I'm aiming for is still very far away.

With that in mind, though, I want to write about absolutely anything I feel I have a say in. Politics, economics, medicine, personal development, and issues affecting our society. Mental health is one of the serious problems facing teenagers, even worse than I thought. I'd like the lines I write here to help my kids in a few years, to help them find some psychological and mental balance, and to be an anchor in their development, the way martial arts was for me. At the same time, I hope as many of you as possible can make use of what I write here. I apologize if the message isn't always clearly expressed, or if the way I write puts you off. The truth is I'm not a writer, and not an editor. I have zero experience with anything like this. I'm just a father trying to save his thoughts, experiences, and lessons onto paper, and pass them on to his children.

I wish you all a pleasant read, and I encourage you to reach out to me.

Colmar, July 2026

Daniel Popescu

Father and husband

Specialist in General Medicine

Specialist in Anesthesiology