Just over a month has elapsed since my retirement from patient care. I’ve been to one grand rounds at my prior medical center, encountering a smattering of old friends, some preceding me to retirement, others in active discussions with their financial advisers and others a mixed multitude of residents and students assigned to the secondary campus that month looking upon us geezers in the small video access conference room with amalgam of awe and envy but no apparent desire to tap our wisdom or experience in any way. They offered coffee that 8 a.m. none of the mostly unhealthy breakfast goodies that I used to seek out from the table when I worked there eight years previously.
My name was no longer on the roster for CME credit, part of the reason for exiting my house that early in the morning, but I signed underneath, leaving a printed name, address, email, and home phone so there would be no ambiguity about who should get that hour’s credit. Pleasantries on arrival, but silent abrupt departure at the conclusion, as the majority of those in the room then had to move along quickly to their daily tasks, mostly clinical.
For the most part, my “medical mind” for the last month has laid fallow. I submitted two essays, one of which I have a contractual obligation to produce and the other for a very good friend who is developing a consulting business which needs a pipeline of science writing. One essay written a few months before appeared in print, so I read it and added the author’s response to the readers’ comments, of which there were quite a few. And I read the table of contents of my two subscription journals though none of the articles in either. Some medical journal summaries come to me passively when I open my daily email or Facebook. I paid much less attention than I would have as an active physician. Agriculturally, though, fields lie fallow for renewal, mandated as far back as the Old Testament where cultivation is suspended every seven years to allow the farmers to rest and focus on returning for the next cycle.
Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.
