Still Strugglin'

Yesterday, my Dermatologist told me a story about a colleague of hers.

They were both about my age (28) and had just completed their medical residency. My sweet, wonderful doctor decided to stay at our med school's Hospital doing research at the time, while her colleague started working in hospitals and clinics as a clinical Dermatologist.

Two years later, when she was 30, 31 years old, she found out that she did not want to be a doctor anymore. Perhaps she never wanted.
She fell into a deep depression and refused any treatment.
Then, she retired. She was just past her thirties and retired, simply putting an end to her professional life and never looked for any other option, neither in Medicine, neither in any other thing.
I have already had clinical depression, though not severe, but I was never resilient to any treatment. The same may be said about the disease that has been made me derelict (derelict as in 'not being able to exert my job', it's one of the definitions of this term), my severe atopic dermatitis / eczema (more about it here). I never stopped trying, even knowing that no doctor in the world can come up with a solution to control my condition or just make it go away. I resent the fact that it causes me pain every day and that all the money I had earned during my 2 years and so 'Doctor Carter' years, working as much as I could in two E.Rs as an Emergency Doctor, was spent in medical solutions, alternative or not, and psychotherapy with the best psychologists and psychiatrists (no, they didn't find anything wrong with me in the 'mental' field, my mild depression was before that), because I felt my eczema getting worse each passing day.
The point is, I never stopped fighting. And I feel really sorry for that lady, even though I have never met her.

I would like to shout: 'I am still standing, I am still STRONG!', but I would be fooling myself.

I am still standing. I am not strong like I used to be, but I do not plan on giving up.

And I would like to know if there's anybody out there who is going through or has gone through an incapacitating disease that we doctors do not know how to control, especially severe dermatological conditions.