“365 Days a Year”

When I see a patient we sometimes get into discussions about anything and everything, especially at the time of scheduled physical examination because I leave a lot of time for finding out about patient’s lives and how that is affecting their health, but also because I am truly interested in my patients.

At today’s visit, Jim* was struggling with possible retirement so we talked about it. He and his wife had started a company in their garage and grew it to the point where they now have 30 employees, and now that he has a buyer for the company he is trying to decide whether to accept the offer or not. Fortunately, Jim has outside interests other than work so I think he will do fine. As far as his health I told him to limit his alcohol to no more than 2 drinks per day. My nurse drew blood work to check his cholesterol and glucose and I added too the request for PSA because of a family history of prostate cancer. We scheduled a flexible sigmoidoscopy because of a family history of colon cancer.