Still being
forged.
I'm an urgent care physician writing from inside the repair. This is the longer version — where I came from, what I do on a shift, what I value, and what I'm working on right now. Hard things, done daily, even when imperfect.
Who I am.
Dennis Li. First-generation, immigrant family. Son of a father who worked three jobs in a new country so that his kid could walk into a school he couldn't read the signs of. That fact is load-bearing — the work ethic and the refusal to quit were not personality. They were inherited.
I live in the East Bay with my partner Jasmine — also a family medicine physician — and our Cane Corso, Nova. I hike, travel, make coffee the scientific way, ride an electric skateboard on good days, take photographs, and read something that isn't medicine every morning.
Walnut Creek CA
ABFM boarded 2026
apparel, late 2026
What I do on a shift.
Urgent care is my version of the firefight. Four patients an hour. Breadth over depth. Someone walks in scared, in pain, or not sure why they're feeling what they're feeling — and I'm the person in the room.
Teaching is the through-line. Whatever I've figured out — usually the hard way — I'd rather see it show up in someone else's decisions than stay trapped in my head. Mentorship is the part of the work I don't have to talk myself into.
On the side, I build effective systems — the kind that take friction off the shift, free up time, and give those hours back to the things I love outside medicine.
How I got here.
Seventy. That's how many medical school rejections I got across two application cycles. Forty in the first, thirty in the second. Three years between wanting to be a physician and being one — and most of that wasn't waiting. It was two years of scribing alongside emergency physicians before I was even accepted. A thousand hours of tutoring at AJ Tutoring. Hundreds of hours of MCAT prep coaching. Hundreds more as an academic consultant. The gap years were a marathon in disguise.
The repair is the point. The breaks weren't obstacles to the story — they are the story.
What I value.
Five domains get daily attention: mental health, body, clinical acumen, wealth, relationships. If any one of them goes untended for long, everything else wobbles. It took me a decade to learn that the loudest domain (the clinical one) isn't the most load-bearing.
Courage is not acting in the absence of fear; it is acting in spite of it.
What I'm working on right now.
The current chapter, as of this update:
- Finishing residency. Graduation June 19, 2026. Last clinical day June 30. Attending start at John Muir Urgent Care in Walnut Creek on October 4 — a deliberate three-month gap to rebuild the chassis.
- Writing @doctor.dennis.md — a small, slow, quiet field guide on Instagram. Four field guides in the Before You series shipping this year. Vol I, Before You Quit, drops May 7.
- Building @kintsugi.forge — a small-batch apparel workshop for people living the long repair. First drop in late 2026.
- Rebuilding the anchor habits — gym, morning meditation, evening journal, clean eating. The 4am-session blueprint from my post-college years is returning.
And, for the first time in eleven years, I am actively learning to rest. It turns out to be harder than any of the above.
If you've read this far.
The short version is on the home page. The long thinking lives in the notes. Instagram is where it all gets said out loud first.