I am taking down my shingle as a family doctor for good.
I am officially retired.
I am giving up the practice of medicine that I loved for so many years.
It is very hard.
So why do it?
So that I can focus with no distraction and no possible other options on helping run the 501(c)3 CLL Society.
Guiding the education, planning what services we offer patients and caregivers, interacting with other doctors and their patients and other nonprofits and cancer centers, researching unmet needs for CLL patients- that is what I love and will be doing.
It is a big deal, but as long as I remain a licensed doctor, however unlikely, I could always return to patient care. I am taking that off the table. Helping my fellow patients and their loved ones with chronic lymphocytic leukemia has been my main professional passion for years. Now it becomes my only professional passion.
I will exclusively work for and with the nonprofit CLL Society to meet the unmet needs of the CLL community until I retire for a second time from working for this nonprofit, retiring from my labor of founding and guiding this wild idea my wife, Patty and I had into a durable and solid institution that will out survive us and hopefully be part of the push that makes CLL a minor annoyance rather than what it is today: a troubling diagnosis too often fraught with anxiety and uncertainty and the recurrent risks of catastrophic therapeutic missteps.
We are racing towards that day. I want to do what I can to hasten its arrival.
And once CLL is cured, the CLL Society can move on too.
Stay strong.
We are all in this together.
Brian Koffman MD (retired)
