Surgeons who have
been here before.

I had been thinking about retirement for years. I told myself I was ready. I had a date. I had a plan — or so I thought.

What I hadn't planned for was the morning after. I woke up without a schedule for the first time in thirty-four years, and I didn't know what to do with my hands. That sounds like a cliché, I know. But for a surgeon, it is completely literal.

The OR had been my structure, my social world, my sense of consequence, and my identity for the entirety of my adult life. I had done the financial planning. I had not done the psychological planning. I didn't know such a thing existed, or that I would need it.

The first six months were harder than I will ever tell most of my colleagues. My marriage survived — I have a remarkable partner — but there were days I wasn't sure I was going to be someone worth being with.

What helped: a retired colleague who had been through something similar, who called me out of the blue and said, simply, "I figured you might be struggling." That call was the beginning of what eventually became my involvement with ASSET.

I share this because I know how many of my colleagues are walking toward exactly what I walked into. The stigma is real. The silence is real. And the help that is available — human help, peer help — is far more useful than I would ever have admitted to myself before I needed it.

I was a good surgeon. I say that not out of pride but out of precision: I was technically competent, my outcomes were solid, and I genuinely cared about my patients. What I was not was a good teacher. I was too busy, too impatient, too inside my own head while operating to give trainees what they actually needed.

Retirement changed that. Without the pressure of a full OR list, without the accumulated fatigue of a thirty-year career, I found I had something I hadn't had in a long time: patience. And time. And, to my own surprise, something to say.

I now spend three mornings a week with residents. I simulate procedures with them. I teach the things I wish someone had taught me at their stage — not just the technical steps but the thinking, the judgment calls, the moments you don't find in any textbook.

I am, without question, more useful to the next generation of surgeons now than I was when I was operating five days a week. That is a strange thing to admit. But it is true.

The hardest part was allowing myself to let go. ASSET helped me see that stepping back from the OR wasn't failure — it was a different kind of service.

I became interested in this topic not because of my own experience, but because of a colleague's.

He was a superb surgeon. One of the best technical operators I have ever watched work. And he went from the peak of his career to a very difficult final few years without anyone — himself included — finding a language to talk about what was happening.

He is fine now. He got through it. But the path was harder than it needed to be, and I think about what might have been different if the conversation had started earlier, with better framing, with less stigma, and with the understanding that what he was experiencing was not weakness but an entirely predictable feature of a career built around a hard stop.

I have been told that commercial airline pilots have mandatory retirement at sixty-five and that the entire structure of their career — the recertification requirements, the medical evaluations, the culture of assessment — prepares them for this moment over decades. There is no equivalent for surgeons. None. And that is not a neutral fact; it is a structural failure that produces real harm.

I don't say this to be dramatic. I say it because I think surgeons deserve to understand why this is hard, and to feel something other than ashamed that they are finding it so.