BLOG: What one happily retired ophthalmologist says about retirement, part 2

ByJohn B. Pinto

Dr. “John Smith” continues to discuss his retirement in this second part.

“What was my ophthalmology career like? I gave it my best shot, and we had a good run at it. But you also think back now, and you think, ‘Gosh, I spent a awful lot of time there in the office pursuing my career at the expense of not doing anything else.’ I didn’t develop a lot of other skills or hobbies because I didn’t have time for it.

“As I look back, I had a lot of fun, and I met and served a lot of nice people. But I do regret that I spent so much of my life doing one thing. With this in mind, you should start thinking about retirement the day you start work. That’s not too early. How are you going to balance work and the rest of your life? Are you making enough time for the things you want to do along the way?

“How do you know when it’s time to retire? You kind of know when you’re ready to go. Nobody has to tap you on the shoulder. You’re psychologically ready to go, and you’re ready to exit. But I can tell you, at least from my experience, when I was ready to quit, I simply stopped thinking about ophthalmology.

“This really surprised me. It really did. You know, I still read a few periodicals, but I haven’t kept up with friends in the profession. It was a pretty clean break. I tried working part time for a couple of weeks, tried semi-retiring, and it simply didn’t work out. And it was so hard to switch from being a surgeon to being a medical ophthalmologist.

“If I had it to do over again, I think I would have had a little different attitude, a different perspective. I certainly would have been more thoughtful in my last 10 years of practice to decide what I was going to do after retirement. Along the way I would have cut down the length of my working day during that time. But in our group practice, we got into this competitive game. It’s the nature of the beast. You’ve got the young guys nipping at your heels, which gives you two things, two feelings. One thing, it stimulates you, and the other thing is it aggravates you. But you know, that’s the way it ought to be. And so you can’t be upset about it, but it does have a profound effect on you, the young ones all smarter and brighter and hungrier.

“I can truthfully say that when I practiced with a peer of my own generation as a partner, I was much happier than when the next generation joined the practice. And this is nothing against the younger doctors who joined the practice as individuals. It just changed the dynamics. It changed from a collaborative environment to one that was more competitive. They were the new guys out of school with all the knowledge, and we were the old guys that didn’t know much. The younger doctors just seemed to join the practice and start out like it was some kind of internal race with each other and with me, rather than with the other practices in our service area.

“This has of course been reflected in our local medical community. I had much warmer feelings about our medical community at the start of my practice than at the end of my career.

“Looking at the last few years of my practice, one of the things that bothered me more than in earlier years and helped move me closer to retirement was surgical complications. A few years earlier, you took a complication as part of the game, something that was going to happen. But in the last 3 or 4 years of my practice, even mild complications were really demoralizing. That bothered me and led me to approach surgery with less confidence toward the end. Also, at that phase of your career, you tend to collect a lot more friends and VIPs as patients — even simply people closer to your own age — so the stakes go up. You want desperately for every one of them to have a great result. Perhaps you also have more empathy at that stage of life. And you certainly don’t want anything to rock the boat.”

John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. John is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist, The Women of Ophthalmology, Legal Issues in Ophthalmology and a new book, Ophthalmic Leadership: A Practical Guide for Physicians, Administrators and Teams. He can be reached at email: pintoinc@aol.com; website: www.pintoinc.com.