Doctors Don't Retire. They Grieve.
The white coat was always the cape. And you know what Superman does in his spare time? Neither does he.
My husband tried retirement. It lasted about as long as a waiting room magazine.
At night he was doing colonoscopies in his sleep, hands moving, working, diagnosing. Even in a deep sleep, he couldn't stop.
He’s back for two half days, one in the office and one at a hospital, and one half day at another hospital where he teaches the medical students. This earned him two white coats, because apparently one was never going to be enough. Factor in the family and friends he consults for across California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Connecticut and New York, plus a 99-year-old Calabrian family member we call Nonna at a local retirement home who says the only one she trusts is “Doctor Michael.” Part time is a generous description and nobody who knows him is surprised.
His brother had asked the question when Michael was considering retirement that cut closest to the bone: What will Michael be without his white coat? Turns out, we found out. He had no idea.
That’s the thing about being a doctor that nobody talks about when they’re handing you the piece of cake and the plaque at the farewell party. The coat isn’t clothing. It’s a self. That coat walks in and everyone sits up straighter. It’s the reason conversations stop, faces turn, and smart, capable, accomplished people wait for the verdict. They wait for the words that will restructure their entire week, and maybe their entire life.
Doctors are rockstars. Not the messy kind who trash hotel rooms, but the kind who command a room without trying. Everyone is already seated when they arrive. The diagnosis is the production. The rounds are the tour. And like any rockstar worth the stage, they start to believe that the applause is just the sound the world makes.
My ex-husband needed the stage too. His coat was a leopard jacket and his stethoscope was a bass guitar slung over his shoulder. Take away the crowd and he didn't know who he was either.
I’ve watched it happen to doctors we know, retirement party after retirement party. The ones who stop working split neatly into two camps. Neither is what you’d call peaceful.
One friend didn’t just retire but also surrendered his medical license. He closed the door completely and now spends his days wondering why he left. “No one cares what I have to say anymore,” he told us recently, with a bluntness that landed like a small punch. He used that word, the one that haunts people who spent their whole careers being indispensable: relevant. He doesn’t feel it and probably hasn’t since the day he let his medical license expire.
Then there’s the one who retired but can’t quite leave. He shows up at the hospital most days, not to work, but just to be there. He walks the halls, grabs coffee in the break room, lingers near the nurses’ station. He’s not on call and he’s not consulting. He just needs to be in the building.
And then there are the ones who retired and promptly got sick. Or died. It happens with a frequency that is either coincidence or what happens when something essential is taken away from a person. The body, apparently, pays attention. We’ve lost too many that way. Doctors who survived decades of impossible hours and impossible decisions, undone by the very rest they spent their careers earning.
Which brings me to Michael’s close friend who is approaching 80 and recently signed a ten-year lease on a new medical office. His mind is as keen as it ever was, and he has a reputation for cracking the cases that leave everyone else stumped. He didn’t consult the statistical tables when he signed that lease. He consulted his gut, and his gut said to keep going.
These doctors cling to their white coats and stethoscopes like passengers gripping the last lifeboat, not because they’re afraid of the water, but because they’ve forgotten there’s a shore.
But this phenomenon is more complicated than ego. Both of these men are still teaching, still shaping the doctors who will outlast them. That changes the calculus entirely.
Once a week, Michael stands in front of medical students and teaches them not just technique, but how to think, how to sit with uncertainty, how to fight for a patient, how to carry the weight without being crushed by it. And he’s not doing it for the money. He made his living in the good old days, when medicine was still medicine and doctors ran the show. Now he’s operating inside the big corporate machine that healthcare has become, and he’s actually losing money. The teaching pays nothing but he shows up anyway.
Why? Because what he’s afraid of losing can’t be found in a database or a protocol. It’s judgment and instinct. The ability to look at a patient and know something the tests haven’t confirmed yet. The gut feeling that something is wrong before the labs confirm it. The thing he desperately wants these new kids on the block to know: that this profession was never supposed to be about the money in the first place.
And then there's the question he can't let go of:
Who will take care of us when we’re all gone? He means it literally.
And underneath the teaching, there’s something else, something that has poisoned the joy of medicine even as they refuse to leave it. The system has changed. If you want to see my husband furious in the way that only someone with fifty years of self-control can be, put him on the phone with an insurance administrator who has just denied his patient a necessary procedure. It happens constantly. A doctor with five decades of experience, overruled by someone on the other end of a phone line with a checklist and a mandate to cut costs. The patient waits and sometimes deteriorates, and the doctor who actually examined the patient has to explain why the answer is no.
The administrators don’t examine anyone. They don’t wake up at 3 a.m. yet they hold the keys to a patient’s life.
This is what the younger generation is inheriting, which is why Michael and his colleagues feel such urgency about what they’re passing down. Not just here is how you diagnose this but here is how you fight for your patient when the system tells you not to bother. They try to tell these young doctors how to stay a doctor when the system is trying to turn them into a billing code.
But enough about the system. Let's talk about the winery.
I went to my high school reunion with my best friend and her husband. We were in the modern dance club together and we hung out with rock musicians and low riders, so we weren’t exactly a part of the popular social butterfly crowd who ran the school. But we’d done pretty good since. She was now the vice president at an aviation company and I was an accomplished professor. We still looked good and figured we’d pull a Romy and Michelle, walk in, own the room and collect our long-overdue moment.
We walked into the banquet and the shouting started immediately, but not for us.
Dr. Albertson! Over here!
Former patients everywhere. One owned a winery and was personally pouring Michael the best bottles she had, the kind of wine that doesn’t appear on menus, the kind you have to know someone to drink. And then came the stories.
The man who said Michael caught something on a routine scope that nobody else had thought to look for. You saved my life. The woman who had been dismissed by three other doctors before Michael sat down, actually listened, and figured out what was wrong. You gave me my life back. The one who had been terrified and had put off coming in for years, and whom Michael had talked through the fear with such patience that she finally showed up, and it was a very good thing she did. I wouldn’t be here without you. On and on it went. Glass after glass of the good wine. Story after story, my husband standing there, smiling, remembering details about each of them.
My best friend, the aviation executive, and I, the professor, sat with our glasses filled with whatever cheap crappy wine came with the overpriced reunion ticket.
We had wanted our Romy and Michelle moment. We got a standing ovation, just not for us.
And here’s the thing I couldn’t be annoyed with. Every single one of those people meant it. This wasn’t chit chat. These were people who remembered the exact appointment, the exact words, the exact moment when someone in a white coat looked at them and knew what to do, when the verdict came and it was the right one.
The coat wasn’t even there that night. He didn’t need it.
And here’s the other thing nobody tells you when you marry a doctor. They don’t clock out. Not even at 35,000 feet with a glass of champagne in hand.
Twice on planes the announcement has come over the intercom. Is there a doctor on the flight? You’d think a man on vacation might hesitate. Might finish his drink. Might let someone else handle it. Instead, Michael hits the call button faster than I can down my free champagne. The first time, a woman with a cardiac issue. He was calm, steady, already in physician mode before I’d processed what was happening. The second time was a man who couldn’t leave the lavatory. He was vomiting with diarrhea that resulted in the closure of the restroom. Drunk at altitude. For my husband, a gastroenterologist, it was just another Wednesday. For me, it was a full hazmat situation upon arrival at the hotel.
But he ran to both of them, like Superman answering a call that only he can hear.
In Hawaii, we stepped into an elevator. A young man stood next to us in a Hawaiian shirt, and before the doors had fully closed, Michael glanced at his arm and said, Shark bite? The guy stared at him. Yeah. How the hell did you know that? Michael shrugged. I just know.
He just knows. He always knows. An elderly woman collapsed on a street in New York and Superman, again, scooped her up and brought her to safety before the rest of us had registered she’d fallen. He is never not working, never not scanning, never not diagnosing, The physician brain doesn’t have an off switch.
Put on a medical drama in our house and the TV might as well be a patient. He calls the diagnosis out loud and he's right almost every time. Dr. House built a career on that. Michael just calls it from the couch.
And then there’s what Michael calls the cloak of invisibility.
The white coat, it turns out, is not just an identity but a master key. Doors that are closed to everyone else open without question. He can walk into a radiology suite mid-read and the technician turns the screen toward him without being asked. He can access floors, files, colleagues, information, the coat preceding him like a credential nobody thinks to challenge. The world parts for a man in a white coat.
It has even gotten him out of a traffic ticket. He was still wearing it when the officer pulled him over. The officer took one look, handed back the license, and waved him through. I’m not saying that’s how the system should work; I’m saying that’s how the system does work.
Superman has the cape. Michael has the coat. The difference is Superman is fictional. Take the coat away and you’re just a man in traffic, waiting like everyone else.
But nothing illustrated who Michael is quite like Valley Fever.
Valley Fever is a fungal disease that invades the lungs and can kill you. It nearly did. He lost 40 pounds, couldn’t walk, and ended up intubated in the ICU, which is where a group of young doctors found him with his laptop balanced on his chest, pulling up his own X-rays, studying them with the curiosity of a man reviewing someone else’s interesting case. They stopped, looked at him for a long moment, and I heard one of them say: Now that’s something you don’t see every day.
It is in our house.
What these young doctors didn’t know was that before they intubated him, while he was flat on his back on steroids and barely able to breathe, he was on the phone with New York. This was the moment when he was choosing to leave private practice and transition to an academic institution, deciding between two positions at two major hospitals, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. He chose New York, which meant we’d be returning to the city where both our families began, the city we love. He negotiated the details from his sickbed. He made deals while the IV dripped. He chose the city, chose the hospital, chose our future, and then they wheeled him into ICU. Several weeks later after leaving rehab, he was on a plane to New York.
As I write this, even I have to stop and take it all in. Just weeks after ICU and a rehabilitation center where he learned to walk again, he was hopping subways to Brooklyn before I’d finished unpacking.
And here’s what drove him there. Not ambition, not ego, not the need to prove something after nearly dying. The patients in that culturally diverse community in Crown Heights had been waiting months for procedures. He showed up and turned the entire program around, working long hours until every patient had been seen, walking the fellows through every step, teaching at the same relentless dedication he always has, the phone calls coming at all hours, carefully explaining and questioning.
I'd lie awake listening and think that not too long ago, this man was in the ICU on a respirator fighting for his life. Is he even human? And then came the farewell celebration for the fellows and I had my answer. Maybe I really had married Superman.
He’d only been there a few months, barely enough time to learn which subway to take, but the fellows gave speeches about what Dr. Albertson had meant to them. Not polite, obligatory speeches but real ones, the kind where you can tell the person means every word.
After the banquet, four of them insisted on driving us back from Brooklyn to Manhattan. They piled into the car laughing like a group of wild Bohemians who’ve been through something hard together and had come out the other side, all talking medicine and telling stories. The young doctor behind the wheel took the Brooklyn Bridge like he'd just finished a grueling fellowship and was invincible. He had.
When we finally got out, my knees shaking and my knuckles white from gripping the door handle, Michael turned to me, still lit up from the inside, and said: Nothing will ever beat the high this gives me.
I keep asking Michael if he’ll ever slow down. If he’ll travel without scanning the cabin for medical emergencies and take a vacation that is actually a vacation. If he’ll let go and just have fun.
This is fun, he says.
This honestly is its own kind of diagnosis. Because the 3 a.m. call, the denied procedure, the drunk man in the lavatory at 35,000 feet, the student who finally understands something, the patient who gets better, is never a burden. It’s evidence that he’s still the person the room waits for. Still needed. Still known. Still the one who just knows about the shark bite before anyone says a word.
The coat was never just a coat. It was always a cape. And the cape doesn’t hang in the closet or get folded up and put away when the vacation starts or the retirement party ends or the ICU makes it clear that you’re the patient this time.
He recently told me that without medicine, he’s just circling the drain. I considered this and then it struck me. He’s never had to confront the question that consumes so many of us: Who am I and why am I here? For Michael, that was settled a long time ago.
But out here, in the ordinary world, these doctors, the ones who gave everything to medicine and expected nothing back, don’t know who they are without it.
Just men. And that, it turns out, is the one condition none of them know how to treat.