"Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member." –Groucho Marx
I caught up recently with a colleague, a cardiac surgeon, about 5 years after we last saw each other. What a delight, and a reminder that we really do participate in a unique profession. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of attending national meetings has been and will always be the opportunity to see colleagues from one’s past: from medical school, residency, fellowship, or just prior collaborations. In these difficult times for medicine, it’s a positive that we can have warm personal relationships built on professional ones.
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Groucho Marx
Even without a secret handshake or password, there is something special, something unifying about our training, about the long hours (at least before the so-called reforms), about our mutual dedication to the welfare of patients, and to the profession. Though it is a cliché, we share the fact that we’ve been involved with critical "life and death" decisions and real life dramas. We’ve witnessed both the touching and the absurd.
I am not anticipating another 5-year wait to see my friend again. I suspect he feels likewise because over dinner we made plans, albeit tentative, to finally write "the paper" we’ve been talking about for over a decade. Even if we never get around to doing it, we have an excuse for more meetings and for keeping it on our mutual "to do" lists.
As for Groucho Marx (and with apologies to Mr. Boothroyd, my seventh grade grammar teacher), this is one club I still want to belong to.