I enjoy working with adolescents and young adults who are in treatment for addiction because, despite their vulnerability, they are at an age where interventions have a reasonably high chance of being successful. Their genetic risk for addiction is something they cannot change, but they can modify their overall risk by changing their environment and carefully choosing their friends.

It was his first visit to a hospital–any hospital–since his birth in this one eighty years earlier, and the trip to the emergency department for blood in the urine soon escalated into a workup for bladder cancer. He became one of the most memorable patients of my medical school experience and, for that matter, my entire career.

Though so crotchety that some of the staff avoided him whenever possible, he and I always got along well.

I grew up on a farm in Connecticut, went to college in Rhode Island, and have lived my entire adult life in small-town Vermont, so the mores of rural New England are deeply engrained in me.

That means Robert Frost’s poetry is part of my vernacular. (I own two hardcover copies of You Come Too, a collection of his most popular poems: one copy was printed the year I turned ten and bears my name on the flyleaf in childish script;

In late fall of 2020, rumors were buzzing around the hospital where I worked about a possible retirement buyout package. My supervisor and I sat in our large conference room discussing what we had heard. I said, “If the offer is decent, I will probably accept the package. I don’t want to work until I’m carried off the unit on a stretcher.” Then, with my usual humor, I chuckled and added, “I tried that once and it didn’t turn out so good.”