Three summers ago, I moved my family back to northern Michigan, settling briefly into a small home that should have worked well as a home base while we traveled extensively for the next three to four years.
Man plans and epidemiologists laugh. No, these last few years haven’t looked entirely like we expected, but we’ve made the best of an unusual situation, and I don’t regret the decision I made to set aside the laryngoscope.
I’ve been asked many times if I might go back to work as a physician. My early answer was “probably not” and the likelihood needle has moved closer and closer to zero ever since.
In certain careers, a person can leave for an extended period of time and pick up where they left off with relative ease, even if it’s years down the line. Physician careers are not among these.
To be frank, if I were in need of a medical procedure, I would not want to have a surgeon, anesthesiologist, interventional radiologist or cardiologist who is in his first few days back after an extended absence of many months.
As the doctor, I’d want to be confident in my skills and up to date on the latest literature. After a year or two away from medicine, I can’t imagine many physicians would have that confidence.
In the first month or two of FIRE, we completed the move from Minnesota to Michigan and started to get settled into our new hometown. My wife got the homeschool ball rolling, and we made all sorts of travel plans.
We were booked on a 30-day cruise with friends to Shanghai, China by way of Hawaii, Guam, Japan, and South Korea! Yeah, that was for the fall of 2020, and it obviously didn’t happen.
After five and a half months of traveling around southeast Asia, we were to return on a 15-day cruise from Japan to North America with several stops in Japan and one in Russia! Of course, that didn’t happen either.
Year three started a lot like year two did with more canceled travel plans. Three of us were vaccinated, but our younger son was too young to qualify, and his age group wasn’t approved until November.