I’m about to start my next great adventure.

I’ll get right to business: I am retiring in June. If you are interested, here are my 10 reasons why:

1. I have reached the full retirement age for my birth year, 66 years old.
2. I want to leave before someone must pull me aside and have “that talk” with me about how it’s time for me to hang it up.
3. I’m not going to live forever. I’ve had many medical problems from cardiovascular to cancer. I survived them all, but I am not a cat. Too many more lives I do not have. I want to enjoy the rest of this one.
4. I am fatigued by changes in our profession and by how confrontational the practice of our specialty has become on so many levels. I can and thus far have adapted, but frankly, I don’t feel like doing it any more. The only way to avoid this stress is, well, to avoid it!
5. I think I have saved enough. I am confident but not positive that my money will outlast us. On paper, yes, but reality bites. Our future health needs will matter. So does the genetic pool. The women in my wife’s family routinely have lived to be 100, so she may be retired for longer than I have worked.
6. I’m satisfied with my career. I helped people. I contributed to the science. I trained my successors. There’s nothing else I want to do.
7. I want to be fair to my associates. My house is paid for; my children are finished with school. I have no major expenses, yet I’m still performing surgery two days a week. I have several young and excellent associates who have student loans, children at home and fresh mortgages. They need to make money a whole lot more than I do. It’s time for me to get out of the way and let them take over. If I don’t disappear completely, my specter will hover over them.
8. I am replaceable. I am told, “They could never get by without you.” Yet, if I dropped dead tomorrow, they’d be operating at full capacity before my body was cold. I am not indispensable.

   

9. I have so many other things I want to do before I sail into the sunset. I am a competitive sailor with venues I have not yet visited. I am a wooden-boat builder with a classic gaff-rigged sloop slowly taking shape in my shop that has years to go before completion. I’ve been offered a teaching gig at the community college. I have a granddaughter who needs babysitting. I am going to be one of those retirees who wondered how I ever had time to work.
10. Twenty years from now, I want our neighborhood to know my wife and me as that cute elderly couple who are always holding hands while shuffling along on their evening walk. OM

Paul S. Koch, MD is editor emeritus of OM and medical director of Koch Eye Associates in Warwick, R.I. His e-mail is pskoch@clarisvision.com.