Good evening colleagues and partners,
It is a pleasure to be able to address you tonight. But it is not an unalloyed pleasure. I have been nervous about this talk. My previously certain knowledge that I can
stand in front of a crowd and talk for as long as is required is just a little
less certain. I have had to write this
speech! If you are like me, your
footfall is a little less certain, your strength less, your hair has changed,
your visits to the doctor are less cavalier.
To prove just how much I have changed, I have decided to restrain myself
from offering my parody on Shakespeare’s 7 Ages of Man. On a night like this you should be spared the
details of the 7 Ages of Incontinence.
This speech will reflect on us, on the way of things nowadays,
the way they have changed, and offer a way through it all.
And here we all are!
What a bunch. I have done some googling
(now there’s a verb that didn’t exist 40 years ago – in fact my son the IT
hotshot expresses surprise at how I did some of my revision for Final Year
exams in the Bosch Medical Library on the computer!). In that googling I have discovered what a
wonderful bunch we are. I restricted my
search to those 83 colleagues who had committed to attend this function a
couple of weeks ago.
We have been busy.
We have provided medical care to outlying areas, more than a quarter of
us practising in regional and remote areas, like Megan, whose practising
address, according to AHPRA, really is in a place called Cooee! We have been involved in broadening the base
of the profession, with several of us early members of the College of Rural and
Remote Medicine, the College of Intensive Care Medicine, the Chapter of Sexual
Health Medicine and the Chapter of Addiction Medicine.
We have professors!
A dozen of them if you count the
8 A/Profs. My tatty and methodologically
unsound google review was ennobled in the discovery that Elizabeth Magassy, GP
at Wollongong, not only had a PhD, an A/Prof but is also Deputy Chancellor of
the University of Wollongong.
And we have contributed to the scientific literature,
some of us most notably, like Rob Finlayson’s documentation of the
seroconversion illness of HIV, but its massive 935 citations are 220 fewer than
Luciano Dalla Pozza’s paper on telomere length in human tumours. I know of at least two textbooks written by
members of our cohort.
Of course, Tim Ingall has made it big in the States, but
remains connected to Sydney as a regular contributor to Column 8.
And some of us have already hung up our stethoscopes,
removed our brass plates and collected our superannuation. From their absence on the AHPRA register,
their registration as non-practising or the warm farewells in regional
newspapers, it is apparent that at least 6 of us have already retired.
We have Peter Collignon, AM and Mark Henscke, OAM in the
room. And David Baines, whose charitable
contributions to medicine in the third world earned a run on ABC’s Foreign
Correspondent.
In their glossy history, Careflight claim Howard Roby as
their own for his role in the famous resuscitation of Kerry Packer.
And we have been prominent members of our communities
outside medicine, with contributions to music, poetry, politics, swimming,
opera and even security. We even have a
member of parliament – well done Mike Freelander, for that distinction, as well
as being one of two of us who has a Wikipedia page, but I guess you have staff
to do that!
So we are no slackers, we have award stackers, hacker knackers
and we include Packer whackers and distant Column 8 trackers.
And what do we encounter in 2018? Disrespect!
We have to deal with offhand Gen Ys at every turn, many of them
complaining that our 40 years of hard work and saving makes them relatively
poor and that we ought to do something
about it. Our millennial offspring have
been pampered and protected because we had the capacity, the knowledge and the
resources, financial and human to keep our kids safe. Here I should make special reference to my
loving wife Libby and her abilities to determine the best practice
available. She was on first name terms
with several of the employees in the Traffic Accident Research Unit (TARU) when
our children were young. We always had
evidence based child restraint in our cars.
In my current role, my main “deliverable” to use the
business jargon, is the 6 monthly rotation, the placement of 116 trainee
psychiatrists against 110 posts. Of
course, I oversee a team that does all the trouble shooting arising from
dealing with 116 trainees and their exam hassles, their College dramas and
their issues various. Nonetheless, colleagues roll their eyes about the
lightness of my load. But they are
silenced when I remind them that I have to do 116 deals with 116 millenials
every 6th months.
This millennial generation has always been treated as
special and have been highly protected, thus they are confident and entitled. They are tech savvy but they spurn the fast
track and seek work/life balance via flexible work schedules. They are team oriented, but they crave
attention. And they are more likely to
switch jobs.
They graduate with $100,000 debts and resent the fact
that we expect them to work anywhere near as hard as we did at the same
stage. And we must restrain ourselves
from giving them the benefit of our experience of being on call for days at a
time and receiving exactly as much support as our senior felt like giving
us. Ahhh, the joys of the generation
gap.
So things have changed a lot. We have a lot we could whinge about: so many
of the differences were unwelcome.
And what about those changes? When we graduated, it was
to be another 11 years before there was a public internet. The Walkman had not been invented. It has already been made obsolete by the
iPod, launched on October 23, 2001. The
iPod, in turn, has largely been made obsolete by the music function of the iPhone
which was first marketed on June 29, 2007.
What else has changed?
Can you remember when all cupboards had handles (you
didn’t just push them to open them)?
When all phones had cords, and then, miraculously when
walkabout phones meant that you could stray 20 feet from the base?
Back then, there was only one kind of lettuce, wasn’t
there? Now I learn that what I always
regarded as “LETTUCE”, is actually ‘iceberg
lettuce’, as distinct from ‘cos
lettuce’, green leaf, red leaf and oak leaf lettuce, not to forget ‘butterhead’ lettuce which comes in 2 varieties – Boston or Bibb. Really!
In 1978, if you were fancy enough to use it, all Parmesan
cheese came in a green cardboard cylinder.
Ordering a coffee was simple – black or white!
And nobody knew what EVOO was.
Back then, if you were planning a literature review, it
always required Index Medicus, the lumbering books documenting all medical
publications of each year by author and subject.
Andrew has made note of the fact that we have lost 14
colleagues. What alchemical combination
of genes, environment and luck has allowed the rest of us to survive and thrive? And how might we deal with successive waves
of change that undoubtedly face us?
First to the facts: We are the longest lived generation
ever. At age 64, I am due, on average,
another 20.4 years. The women get an
extra 2.7 years beyond that.
We have to stay positive.
We have to resist the relentless marketing that insists that we will
only achieve happiness if we put ourselves in further debt. Equally we must repel the superannuation
industry which would have us all quivering at the thought of ONLY having $1.6
million in superannuation.
We have to remember that most of us, if not in the top
0.5% of income at >$290,000, are in the top 1% at >211,000.
Gratitude will buoy us up. Not the gratitude of our patients, but our
own gratitude for the amazing opportunities we have been given. We have been given the great privilege of a
career as healers. Our careers have been
uninterrupted by war or famine. We have
seen the emergence of treatments for previously untreatable conditions. Our country was the one country in the
developed world to withstand the worst economic upheaval of the last 50
years. Our generation has travelled the
world further and more comfortably than ever before.
And while I urge you to gratitude, I should thank Andrew
Byrne for doing all the work to make this event happen.
AA has taught me
to share what positivity I have with others. And the neurobiology supports
it! Brain-imaging studies of
mother–child attachment, like addiction, is associated with reduction in
amygdala firing and increases in nucleus accumbens activity.
Further, AA urged
me to maintain an attitude of gratitude, and guess what? Imaging
researchers have shown that giving to your favourite charity, like taking cocaine,
stimulates the nucleus accumbens. In short, giving and gratitude are rewarding
in and of themselves. At a molecular level!!!
We all know what it is like to have a tough
day’s work in the clinic, giving and giving and giving of our intellect, our
skill, experience and care. At the end
of such a day we are like the long distance runner, worn out but
satisfied. We know the runner’s
satisfaction is mediated by endorphins (and amazingly is blocked by
naltrexone!). So we can only assume that
our satisfied somnolence is also borne on the wings of Morpheus, via the
stimulation of the endorphin receptors.
We have known the joy of assisting people
in distress. Now the task is to ignore
the marketing and embrace the concept of ENOUGH.
We can reflect on our great careers, our
amazing colleagues and the fullness of our lives. As we do we can nurture gratitude:
for having lived in this amazing time in
history,
for being graced with great educations,
for being honoured as doctors,
but mostly for the great joy we have gained
from helping people.
