Exit Strategy

It wasn't that long ago that I honestly told people that I had no idea when I might retire.

Somehow things have changed. In some future posts I would like to explain this a bit, but let's just for the time being say that I'm in the process of finding a way to stop doing what I'm doing as a physician.

My "Uncle Doc", my grandmother's brother, some years ago told me that he "retired too soon." This coming from a man who retired from family practice at 84yo. But what he meant was that he had no exit strategy. He didn't take the time, take the bother to develop some outside interests, some idea of what he was going to do when he retired. So when he retired, he spent his days, first of all stopping by the office where he used to practice to chat to his former staff, then he'd swing over to the hospital he used to attend at and sit in the doctors lounge and chat with colleagues.

I can't see myself doing that. Sure, I may stop and visit at times, but that's not going to define my days, and from his experience it's just as well.  He died not long after that visit I had with him.

I don't find medicine as envigorating as it once was. Yes, I enjoy my time in the hospital, facing some unknown issue, getting a history, doing an exam, putting together some hypothesis about what's going on, what to do about it. But I am more bothered by episodic interruptions, by getting the names of new consultations in the mornings. Not that I see things I don't know what to do. I've seen so much it all just happens now, the differential diagnosis, testing, empiric and other treatments. And it's not boring.

But still this dread of having to go in every day, not knowing when the next new thing is coming. I think it's time to look for the exit from this.

Getting back to my uncle, what's next? I have a lot of interests. Many of them involve computers. I have this blog, but the time since my last post says a lot about how invested I am in this. I help with the development of Scribus, an open source software program. My job is mostly documentation.

I'm thinking I need to carve something else out. Maybe something I haven't done before, or maybe only dabbled in. I have some interest in, but not necessarily a lot of faith in the various things you find out there for "preventing dementia." Do these things work or just identify people who were low risk in the first place?

But I like learning new things anyway, so this will probably be part of my strategy. I like to travel, and no doubt will continue that to some degree, but I also know that travel is irritating in various ways, so I don't see spending a lot of time on that. Maybe I can now take some trip that might last a couple of weeks or more, something I haven't ever considered in the past. You take two weeks off work and the mountain that piled up while you were gone is amazing.

There are any one of a number of charitable things I could do in some way related to medicine, but right now I just don't see these as options. Maybe I just need some time away to see their appeal.

So here I am, still at the beginning or the middle of this. The reason I'm blogging about it is that I think it's true that one of the ways of working through a dilemma is to write down your thoughts about it. The process of turning a lot of competing, well- and ill-formed ideas into something you can understand yourself begins with making some coherent piece that lays it all out so you can create and reread it later.