Attending Grand Rounds

Just under three weeks ago I concluded my mission as clinician, following through on retirement plans set in place five years earlier, delayed by eight months to help my hospital with a transition and at the age I had anticipated ten years earlier.  I do not miss the patients or the clinical challenges they impose.  I thought I would miss the pageantry of the hospital more than I have, but I don't.  This unstructured time sorts out in stages, first being to take better care of myself.  I have an exercise schedule fully maintained and I eat breakfast every day, something that would often take a back seat to the pressures of the clock and the morning commute.  On the advice of a weight control expert who lectured at the Endocrine Society meeting a few years ago, food is verboten from 8PM to 6AM, mostly adhered to.

Part 2 is to get my personal space fully functional.  While a Man Cave seems an excessive extravagance, my hospital always provided me a functional work space which I intend to recapture at home, though it means clearing oodles of paper and obsolete electronics and kids stuff from where I intend my study to be.  Progress there has been satisfactory, limited a little by the amount of recycling that can fit in the bins that get carted off every two weeks, but so far so good.

My mind comes next.  Every six months I read a novel, a non-fiction work and a Jewish work distributed over standard book, e-book, and audiobook.  On schedule.  My journals still arrive, though I have not read beyond the titles yet.  I asked my previous two hospitals to put me on the announcement list for Grand Rounds and other conference schedules, which they did, and I attended my first yesterday.  It took place as a simulcast from the main medical center auditorium twelve miles away at the much expanded hospital in town where I once saw patients almost daily.  The speaker gave a presentation of Medical Homes, a concept that I understand better from the talk, though with some skepticism of whether the mission of better care at less expense will accrue.  Some old friends attended, some retired, some probably asking if I can do it why can't they as some were my contemporaries.  And a lot of residents attended as well.  They had coffee but to my surprise and slight disappointment nothing else.

So which will bring me back, the chance to learn and think about where medicine is headed without me or the handshakes with old friends?  A mixture to be sure.