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“Our patients lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” -Paul Kalanithi in “When Breath Becomes Air“.
This week, after considerable thought and with great ambivalence, I began saying goodbye to my patients. I have intentionally made my “retirement” a prolonged process, stretching back nearly 15 years and beginning with turning my research laboratory over to a wonderful trainee/fellow, Tom Flaig (now Vice Chancellor for Research at CU). I began to stop writing grants (for the most part), working more in the clinic on other people’s ideas, and continuing to write this blog while serving on various boards and IDMC panels (including with the two authors of that IDMC link). Eventually, I reduced my clinic time to one day/week, focusing entirely on prostate cancer and seeing patients only at our outreach site, the Shaw Cancer Center in Vail. But, as I anticipate turning 75 this summer, and as my wife has pointed out, “no one really wants an ‘over the hill’ physician” (even if that doctor is still doing well by his/her patients). It is time to leave the clinic. As Kalanithi points out, inevitably “your hands or judgment will slip”. And even if they haven’t or never do, I believe there is joy and elegance in stepping aside at the right time to provide opportunities for younger physicians to take your place and to the extent they wish, offer advice (wisdom?) if needed.
But what to do with a blog?? As an early adopter, I had great satisfaction helping ASCO develop its website, www.ASCO.org and wrote about what I envisioned as the evolution of internet oncology in this article. My colleagues and I assisted in moving much of the society’s print media online as well as hosting what I think may have been one of the first “virtual meetings” of a medical society in 1995. With the help of a contractor, we digitized 35mm slides, recorded audio, then merged them “by hand” and posted presentations on the internet (within hours of their live presentation) for viewing around the world. Shortly thereafter, I was invited to write medical blogs, and when that effort became commercialized with ads, I elected to start writing this blog “commercial free”. As the internet technology continued to evolve with the evolution of social media (twitter, instagram, tiktok, etc.) I opted out, and so this blog is all that remains of my “brief but spectacular” foray into content creation for the digital world.
The statistics on 733 subscribers to this blog suggest that relatively few visit the website, although I suspect more read the essays themselves which are sent out by the site as emails. Here are the stats for the last quarter:
The way you got this email (or link if you are reading on the wordpress site) is “push technology”. You opted in/subscribed to receive the emails. This led me to wonder what happens to an email or blog when you change pages or “delete”. We all know that they stay somewhere “forever”. I know this means bits and bytes on some server. But when I tried to think about it in Kalanithi terms to title this essay, I tried to imagine “When Pixels Become Electrons” or something similar. I failed. Here is how pixels work and this is how electrons control them. What happens to blogs is still mysterious to me, but I’m switching formats to “pull technology”: responding to queries/ideas rather than guessing what you might want.
There are now numerous online sources for prostate cancer information. If you want excellent push technology to keep you up, I recommend subscribing to “The Prostate Cancer Daily” written by and for experts in the field. If you want to look something up, like the latest clinical trials, please read this blog I previously posted.
Thus…I have decided to change states – just like the LCD crystals that change the polarization of the pixels that have turned black to provide you this text. Going forward, I will use this blog to try and help patients/families only IF they want, by responding to questions, but not by trying to guess what subjects may be of interest and creating a post. I am happy to do whatever research is necessary to explain advances and comment on the science behind them if you send a topic or question to me at prost8blog@gmail.com. I will post monthly answers here as essays on www.prost8blog.com so everyone can see them who is a subscriber. The person(s) who submit questions/ideas (if any) will remain anonymous and I will NOT provide case specific advice. I will also not send return emails from the gmail account except to indicate I have received your request/idea.
BOTTOM LINE: This will be the last post on this blog unless I receive a topic request or question at prost8blog@gmail.com. I will monitor that email site on a monthly basis and post here as needed. I have loved being a part of helping prostate cancer patients/families and wish the best to all of you who have subscribed. If the new approach works, great! And if not, I thank you (and your computer pixels) for sharing some of our lives together. Godspeed…
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