Somehow five years have passed since I finished residency and since my dad's retirement party (though he had the party, he has yet to fully retire). The passage of time is a funny thing...often when I'm running behind in my clinic schedule or when a patient arrives at 10:30 for their 8:15 appointment, I'll say something about time being a social construct or, "What even is time?" One of my coworkers and I often misquote Friedrich Nietzsche by saying, "Time is a square circle," which is our way of saying that time is meaningless or nonsensical. (I have just emerged from a deep dive into the Friedrich Nietzsche Wikipedia page where I learned or was reminded that the actual quote is "time is a flat circle" meaning essentially that history repeats itself.) Philosophies about the nature of time notwithstanding, for some reason I've decided to write a post. (Incidentally, I now have a 3-year-old daughter who occasionally uses the phrase "
{Dad, third from right, breaking ground at the site of his clinic, ~1987.} On June 24, I graduated from family medicine residency and became the fourth family physician/general practitioner in three generations of Dorwarts. A week later, on July 1, our family gathered in Sidney, Nebraska, to celebrate my dad's retirement after 35 years as a family physician there. I couldn't be prouder of the work my dad has done throughout his career, his dedication to our hometown, his persistence through difficult times, and his unwavering insistence on doing the right thing even when it's not the easy thing. Even though I considered forays into surgery and gynecologic oncology (among other things), I am happy to have found my way to family medicine and to my father's footsteps. Although my dad worked long hours throughout my childhood, I never felt like I was missing out because I appreciated the importance of what he was doing. My perception was that he was spending his d