Kimberly Skarupski: Welcome back to the Faculty Factory podcast, friends. I’m Kim Skarupski here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in sunny Galveston, Texas, looking at Dr. Michael H. Malloy, Professor, Division of Neonatology in the Department of Pediatrics, and the Emeritus John P. McGovern Chair in Oslerian Education here at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Hi, Mike. Good morning.
Michael Malloy: Good morning.
Kimberly Skarupski: Well, friends, let me tell you how I met Dr. Malloy. Last year, my first year here at UTMB, we put together this retirement, or I called it a pre-tirement conversation, a panel conversation. And so I met him at the panel and so we’ve been in touch over the year and he shot me this cool email a while ago saying, “Hey, I wonder if you’d be interested in having a conversation with me on the podcast. I’m someone who is a hanger-onner at age 78, still doing clinical medicine, mentoring, scholarship at 0.5 FTE. And so Dr. Malloy said, “Yeah, I’d like the opportunity to reflect on what I’m doing, how I chose this path, and maybe what the next phase will look like. I don’t really have a plan like everybody else in that panel did, but what do you think?” And I’m like, let’s get on the podcast and check it out. So Dr. Malloy, hanger-onner. What’s that like? What’s going on?
Michael Malloy: Well, I must say I’ve been on somewhat of a glide path to retirement for probably the last five or six years. I was doing neonatology and was working in the NICU. And in 2019, after my wife’s death, I decided that maybe it was time to move out of the NICU and to continue my clinical work just taking care of normal newborns, which can in itself be a challenge, but it certainly doesn’t have the degree of intensity as it does working in the NICU. So I bowed out of the NICU probably about 2020 or so, 2019 or 2020, and have continued to work as an attending on the mother-baby service in the hospital. And I have enjoyed that transition out of the NICU. I still maintain contact with what’s going on in the NICU through our division meetings, and occasionally will do a teaching round in there. So that was sort of phase one. And I’m continuing to glide here. I’ve started half time this past July and it’s allowed me a little more freedom in terms of my time schedule. But although I find I’m continuing to do pretty much the same thing in terms of committee participation and mentoring, working with students.
Michael Malloy: So I don’t think it’s so much my time has changed. There’s been sort of a shift in attitude about not feeling quite so obligated to have to be in the office every hour of the working day when I’m not on the clinical service. So that has been a nice and comfortable transition. And now I’m trying to decide whether or not to completely retire here within the next year or so. Some of the ethical considerations that I have that are influencing the decision are, number one, should a 79 to 80-year-old person continue to be doing clinical medicine and putting potentially patients at risk? I think I’m still relatively cognizant and keep up on current therapies and whatnot. But I have had some concern about that. I don’t want to be working when I’m putting potentially patients at risk. So that is a consideration. I would anticipate after retirement from clinical work that I would continue to work with teaching and mentoring students as well as house staff and fellows here. But I’m trying to determine what’s the right point of doing that transition to that lifestyle. And that’s where I’m a bit hung up.
Michael Malloy: I think one of the things that concerns me is that the information on the transition and application for emeritus status is not terribly well spelled out. And one of the concerns I have is about that particular process. I’ve gone online and looked at the UT system process and I think I qualify for that. Except there were rumors floating around that if you can’t retire from a still tenured part-time position for emeritus, I don’t think that’s correct because there’s nothing in the UT system specifications to that degree. Now, I think where some people have gotten misinformation is they considered they can retire, come back and do contract work, and then apply for emeritus. And I think that’s where they can’t do that. But I don’t see anything about someone who is not retired, officially retired, and has continued part-time being ineligible for emeritus. I don’t know. Can you clarify that?
Kimberly Skarupski: I’ll definitely circle back with you on that, Mike, for sure. But if you wouldn’t mind, you said something earlier that I want to circle back on. I think it’s really important because I talk with a lot of faculty, of course, in my role, and coach lots and lots of faculty. And you made a decision somehow. Right now you said you’re kind of hung up on the next step and if you transition and how do you retire and all the ethical considerations and don’t want to put your patients at risk, all those kind of, you’re at that inflection point, what do I do? But at some point, you made a decision to back down from 100% FTE. And you said, it’s been nice, I don’t have to worry about being in the office 24/7 and I’ve cut the hours back, although I’m doing a lot of the same work. So I was wondering if you could reflect on that cutting back. Because what I find is of many of the colleagues that I’ve worked with and faculty I coach, cutting back is never really cutting back. It’s almost like they’re taking a voluntary cut in pay, but they’re still doing the same work.
Kimberly Skarupski: So I’m wondering what advice you would give to others to be disciplined about not just donating your salary back to the institution and saying, well, I’m only 80% effort, 75% effort, 50% effort. And the work never stops. You’re still doing all the work. Maybe you’re not in the office as much, but you’re still at home noodling on these things and answering emails and taking calls. So what are your thoughts on cutting back and how you decided then? What were the series of events that triggered that move to part-time and how do you manage that? How do you manage true part-time work?
Michael Malloy: I’ll say part of my rationale for volunteering to go to a 0.5 FTE in terms of salary was political because we had a new chairperson. One of our challenges in our particular division is having enough manpower to cover all of the slots that are there. And part of my rationale was, well, perhaps they can take half of my salary, hire somebody else to fill some of that slot time. Well, that may or may not have happened. And so that was part of my rationale for doing that. In terms of my cutting back in the other stuff that I’m doing, this is stuff I love to do. And if I’m lucky, my body holds out, I’ll be able to continue to write and read and do scholarship and work with students and house staff for as long as I’m upright and still thinking relatively well.
Michael Malloy: So that is something that I enjoy doing. And I have no inclination to go out and start raising shepherd dogs or be a greeter at Walmart or anything like that. This is who I am. And I think that’s another challenge, particularly for physicians, is their identity is so tied up with particularly their clinical work and who they are. And I guess you could say that about anybody who works in an academic setting that teaches and does any sort of research or scholarly activity is that’s their brand, that’s who they are. And if they’re lucky, they’ll continue that as long as they can.
Kimberly Skarupski: But you’re exactly right, Dr. Malloy. I mean, that’s it. Identity, purpose and meaning, and community. That’s kind of the fun. A lot of the books you read, and I was just listening to a webinar by the author of the book From Strength to Strength, David Brooks, getting him confused, hopefully not with Arthur Brooks, his brother. And anytime I read or hear anything about retirement, it’s always about those kind of aspects. Identity, who am I? Purpose and meaning, what will get me out of bed in the morning? And community, where are my people? Who are my people? And you are hitting the nail on the head when we spend decades of our life introducing ourselves at parties as, “I’m a professor,” “I’m a surgeon,” “I’m a pediatrician,” “I’m an intensivist.” Fill in the blank. What do you say? “I used to be,” “I was,” “In my former life.” And then what you learn in the real world, outside of the hallowed ivory towers, is that people don’t care. People really don’t care that much. They want to know, what are you doing now? They might be like, “Oh, that’s interesting,” to see if there’s a connection there.
Kimberly Skarupski: But other than that, people don’t care how many papers we wrote or how many students we mentored or how many grants we got or how many RVUs we generated. They really don’t. And that’s just… It runs through our blood. So really, when we think about next chapters, it’s what other aspects of me have I kind of tamped down? What delights me as a child or growing up? What did I enjoy doing? Can I resurface some of those aspects of me that are also part of my identity, but I’ve just kind of mushed it down while I was so intensely focused on this career in academic health? It’s tough to carve out those new neural pathways of who am I? Who am I now?
Michael Malloy: Well, it’s interesting. I’ve thought about this in terms of our entire lives. How do we gracefully move into a period of irrelevance? And the thing is, I think we’ll always be relevant to ourselves. And how one accepts, moves into… Unfortunately, the biology is such that we will all end at some point. And I think it was Seneca that suggested that until you understand death, you’ll never understand living. And so how do we accept our finitude but continue to live on, live into what life we have left? And I think that was certainly brought to my attention with my wife’s death. We had been together for 45 years, and we had never really thought about either one of us being gone. And then it comes tumbling down into being able to recognize your own mortality when your other half disappears.
Kimberly Skarupski: Yeah.
Michael Malloy: And that certainly has affected my views on what life I have left. And I think I’ve been very lucky, though, despite the fact of being in a fairly intense academic setting and was at one time wanting to be the world’s greatest living authority on cysteine or something else, some very banal type of chemistry. I’ve been fortunate to integrate other aspects of my life. I have a very strong relationship with my religious community here on the island. My work colleagues, they’re work colleagues, but they’re also family. I’ve got my own biologic family that I still have with me, brothers and sisters who are out there. So trying to integrate that life with your academic life, I think, has helped a great deal, at least for me.
Kimberly Skarupski: Yeah. You make me think, Mike, of the whole push versus the pull. And when you talked about your sweetheart passing, being married for 45 years, that is our identity. I can imagine when you have a long-standing marriage relationship and children and grandchildren, that whole who am I… All the roles we hold: partner, mom, grandpa. That is also part of our identity. And when, by life, circumstances of life pushes us out of a certain role, that’s another… It’s a huge shock to identity. You’re not a husband anymore, you were a husband. All these life events that can happen to us that are… We’d not planned for. In other words, you said we don’t plan for that. That’s different from a pull of I or my partner and I’ve always wanted to travel around the world or, like you said, come up with some, look at little, little baby turtles somewhere on the coastal sea waters of something, something. That’s more like a pull. We’ve always had this yearning. I’ve always had this part of me that thought maybe I should write a book about or I wanted to be doing theater or get more involved in the community.
Kimberly Skarupski: That kind of seems to me like a pull where one hears a… Has a calling maybe to go toward the light, not the big light, but another light, another pathway, versus being pushed out of a job, out of a relationship, out of a home, out of a healthy body. This kind of interesting juxtaposition of pushing and pulling is curious to me. And you said something earlier about I have this ethical consideration that in this next chapter and shifting, do I retire or not? And that is clearly a high values. I don’t want to put my patients at risk.
Kimberly Skarupski: And so you wonder where’s the push or the pull that is that proverbial straw. One of our faculty members coming up on the panel that you mentioned last year happening in a week or so from now, Dr. Malloy, Dr. Dana Wild. I went to her retirement party and she said, someone said, “How did you know? How did you know it was time to go? What happened? What was the trigger, the thing that said, ‘Okay, that’s it’?” She said, “I’ll tell you what it was. It was super easy for me. When I got an email to set a meeting to plan the meeting to plan the bigger meeting,” she said, “I knew that was it.” I just, something happened when I opened that email and it was a meeting to plan a meeting for a bigger meeting. She said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Kimberly Skarupski: And then somebody else in the audience said, “Oh, I knew it was time for me to go when I was told I had to learn another app, another system that we’re doing something else in the hospital. Just download this thing and learn this.” He said, “That’s it. I’m done. I don’t want to learn one more thing.” So I think sometimes there are things, again, pushes and pulls that make that answer obvious. Like, “Yep, time to move,” or, “Yep, that’s the house,” or, “Yep, that’s the gal. I’m gonna marry that one.” Something has to happen, don’t you think?
Michael Malloy: To a certain degree, I think that’s probably true. I’ve been fortunate in that my lifelong goals has never been to be much of an administrator. I’ve always preferred to take care of babies and do my scholarship. And so I have fortunately avoided much in the way of administrative responsibility. So that’s good. So planning the meeting to plan the next meeting to plan the bigger meeting, fortunately, I have not had to do that. But yes, I’m sure there are things. I enjoy the technology and I enjoy learning new systems and whatnot. So that hasn’t been as problematic for me anyway. But there are little backbiting issues that irritate you over time. But fortunately, I’ve been able to adapt. And I guess my movement have been more internal, sort of spiritual revelations of, well, it’s time to move on. And so I’m still holding out for that sort of internal revelation to come about.
Kimberly Skarupski: Mike, it’s so true that what you’re saying is that it reinforces the idea or the reality that transitions are intensely personal. So I was just giving a presentation at The Ohio State University talking to advanced career faculty members in their school of medicine, their college of medicine. And it was somebody said, “Well, what are the steps?” There’s, yeah, there’re checklists to how to retire and how to do this and invest in that and think about that and get all your ducks in a line and go dip your toe in and go hang out in Florida for a month and see if you like it and VRBO over in Portland, see if you like that. And sure, there are things that we can experiment with. We’re curious sorts of people. But it also points out that it’s intensely personal. And you just evidenced that by saying, “Well, gee, I like learning stuff. I’m not afraid of technology. I’m the opposite of a Luddite.” Maybe you’re an early adopter. So for you, someone saying, “Hey, Mike, we want you to pick up something new and learn it,” that might be really juicy. You’re gonna like that versus someone else saying, “No.”
Kimberly Skarupski: It reminds me in my leadership courses at Hopkins when we talk and folks would say, “Well, you need to get a grocery subscription service and they leave the groceries at your house at the front door. You need to get like a wardrobe service. They’ll deliver your wardrobe to your house.” And they’re like, “Yeah, good idea, good idea.” And then someone said, “But I like grocery shopping.” And I’m like, I’m one of those people, too. To me, it’s almost a Zen meditative thing to go early on a Sunday morning or Saturday morning when nobody’s there and walk up and down the aisles, quiet, look at stuff, poke stuff, smell stuff. And the other woman said, too, “Yeah, I like buying my own clothes. I don’t want someone picking my clothes out for me.” So it just underscored the fact that what’s good for the goose ain’t necessarily good for the gander, that it’s all personal. And how do you… So how do you know? You get out there, your network is your net worth. You talk to people, you listen, you experiment, you pilot test something. You say, “Yeah, it’s not for me,” that maybe.
Kimberly Skarupski: And give yourself some grace and mercy, knowing that, like you said, Mike, at some point something’s gonna happen where you’re gonna have the epiphany in the shower, in the middle of the night, on a walk, where you’re gonna go, “Yes. This is my calling. This is my next. This is my new purpose and my new meaning is to do that.”
Michael Malloy: I agree. So it’s good to have resources to consult with, but it again turns into an intensely personal decision. It’s interesting, after my wife died, I read every book that there possibly be, I think, on grieving and loss. But one of the things that I read that was truly true was that it’s a uniquely personal process. Everybody goes through the process quite differently. And I think the same thing is true in terms of the way we transition from our career into whatever’s left.
Kimberly Skarupski: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I agree. Well, this has been, I think, a really important conversation, Dr. Malloy. I think what I’m taking from this is, again, in addition to this being intensely personal, we’ve had a few episodes on the Faculty Factory podcast now. So if you’re listening to this, friends, go to the YouTube channel or on the website facultyfactory.org, you’ll see all of them. Almost 400 episodes now, sorted by topic, and we have a whole bucket called retirement. We’ve had a lot of great conversations. And what I like about this one with Dr. Mike Malloy is that there’s not someone saying, “This is what I did. This is what you should do. This is what worked for me,” and laying out the recipe. This is authentic. This is real. This is someone who is still in it and still thinking about identity, who am I, and loves it and is curious about the next step and being honest, saying, “I don’t know, but I am aware of the shift. I’m thinking about it and I’m keeping my options open.” So that’s what I like about this. And I’ll leave the last kind of parting comments to you, what you’d like to share with our international audience here about your thoughts, Mike.
Michael Malloy: Thank you for the opportunity to allow me to reflect. This is always a learning process to hear someone else help me in my thinking. So I would just encourage everybody else out there to continue to reflect on your own personal reasons for being so miraculously lucky to be where you are to begin with, and be grateful for every day that you have and enjoy it.
Kimberly Skarupski: Thanks for tuning in to the Faculty Factory podcast. We are a faculty development community sharing tools to build academic leaders in healthcare. Maybe you want to be interviewed on the podcast? Please visit facultyfactory.org/contact and send me a message there. The Faculty Factory podcast and website is sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.