When I was seventy years old and still very active with my surgeon job, but thinking of my glide path to retirement, I got a job offer to start a surgical residency. Now that was something to make one reconsider retirement, so I did it. I started with one resident, and it blossomed to 15. It is one of the most challenging but satisfying jobs I have ever had. Teaching is perhaps the most rewarding activity. Passing on your knowledge and skills was a great honor for me, and it was also enjoyable. Leo Tolstoy, possibly the best novelist ever, once said the only honorable job is farming. I will have to add to that teaching. All the residents I taught passed their Surgical Board Examination on their first attempt, which is not an easy feat, considering the general pass rate is 60%. I am proud of that, but I must also claim some credit for playing a role in it.

I belong to a society of surgeons called the American College of Surgeons and was a board member of the Southern California chapter. Every year, they gather to present scientific papers on surgical subjects. One highlight of the meeting is a competition in which residents from seven surgical residencies participate in a Jeopardy-style format quiz. As a new residency, we were not expected or expecting to win, but we did! It made my day and has to go down as one of my major milestones in my career.  It also inspired me to write my eighth book. Many of the questions in this surgical jeopardy contest feature significant surgical achievements and the individuals who made them. Residents often focus on the how-to rather than the history. They asked me to give them lectures on the history of surgery to help them prepare for the next competition, which I did. The residents won again in the following years. I converted those lectures into a book. We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants was the name of the book . The title is a line stolen from Issac Newton, who said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” It was one of my better sellers (on Amazon) and became another milestone for me. Since I no longer ski, writing has become one of my favorite hobbies, and I have written twenty-two books to date (all available on Amazon). But don’t worry, only one of them is on history.

When I started teaching residents to use the robot, that was a challenge all by itself, because at that point, Intuit had not yet developed the dual controls for the robot. The resident was the only one controlling the instruments. It took a lot of very loud talking to gain some semblance of control, although I was at the operating table, assisting with laparoscopic tools, watching the resident on a TV monitor. It did leave me hoarse for a while.  Several of my former residents went on to do fellowships in minimally invasive surgery, which includes robotic surgery. I imagine that now they could teach me a few things. 

I became a professor of surgery, a title, as I understand, that is lifelong and also a noteworthy milestone; the five years passed faster than I had wished. I had a wise surgical mentor during my residency, who not only taught me the techniques of surgery but also the art of the trade.  I had lunch with him with the intention of asking him about how he decided to retire. I asked the question point-blank. His answer, “You will know!” At the time, that did not seem very helpful, but it really was.  When you can’t quite run up the stairs to the ICU for a code blue as fast as before, when your residents ask questions that you have to look up, when you get woken in the middle of the night by a resident telling you about a patient on whom we operated the day before, who is not doing so well, and it gives you heartburn, or is it chest pain? YOU KNOW. I retired in 2018 at age 75, except for occasional lectures to residents and assisting my former partner with complex robotic cases.

At age eighty-two, I hope to delay the final milestone and perhaps sneak in one or two more milestones, Gott willig (a line stolen from my father – God willing translated from German!)