I retired from the practice of Emergency Medicine on April 23rd, 2013.
Some two years prior to that event a friend said to me, “Do you realized you have been a full-time physician for forty years?”
I said, “Say what?!”
He repeated his sentence, and I responded, “Forty what?!”
“Years.”
I thought to myself, “Golly gosh Moses! What in the world have I been thinking?!
I was a practicing ER physician at age twenty-five. How did I do it?
I cheated.
Twice.
The first was: I was a three year student at the Citadel, The Military Institute of South Carolina. My grades were sufficient to allow me to enroll in medical school – The Medical University of South Carolina – after finishing my junior year at the Citadel. [I’m probably the only physician you know who didn’t formally graduate from college.]
My second was: I never attended a residency. As I recall, there was an ER residency program in the mid-west [I can’t remember just where.] But its reputation was likened more to a salt mine than an educational experience. Instead, the folks at Lewis-Gale Hospital assured me that, for my first year working, I would be ‘double-covered’, i.e., I would never stand a shift by myself – and so it was. [As a side note: I recall in my first several years in the ER, we took night-shift calls from home. If a patient came into the ER during that shift, if the nurse couldn’t handle the case, my partners and I would get out of bed, dress, and call and drive to the ER. Things have changed just a bit since then!]
Looking back, I conclude there were three aspects of Emergency Medicine that kept me at it so long: 1.) The thrill of solving a riddle [diagnosing an ailment.] 2.) Helping the folks to get better. And 3.) Meeting people who have lived through circumstances in which I’ve never found myself, and learning from them.
For instance, the gruff old sergeant who was trapped in Bastogne [WW II] for several months when that city was besieged by the Nazi’s; the widowed woman with children to support, and those poor souls with incurable diseases, questioning their way through the black geometry of a death foretold; those who shuffle inch by inch to a soon-coming fate. What do I know of such displays of courage?
Then there were others I met: my medical school professors, my partners through the years; the nurses, ER technicians, and members of fire and rescue. They not only taught me things I didn’t know, but they reminded me of things I had known, but forgotten. Such a rich cast of individuals!
When asked when I would retire, I would answer, “When I stop loving the practice of medicine, I’ll stop practicing medicine.” For forty-two years, the relationship proved a strong one.
Then the loving ended, suddenly, inexplicably. The question ‘Why?’ haunts me yet. So I conclude it was simply time for me to leave what I had loved for so long.
God seems to have His plan – and we are almost always the last to know it.
Lucky Garvin
