What Being A Surgeon Has Taught Me About Personal Finance

Published June 22nd, 2008

Looking back on the last five years of my life, I’m amazed at the changes that have taken place:  I graduated and entered practice, my husband went back to school…then graduated, we got married, built a house…and here we are ready to move on to the next five years and beyond.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my career, and all of the good things I want to do with it, especially when I’ve built more wealth and am able to volunteer more of my time.  As a veterinarian, I feel like I’ve gained a unique perspective from having to be competent in so many different areas;  I need to go from being a general practitioner, to interpreting x-rays, to solving complex medical problems, to jumping into a surgery–sometimes on an emergency basis.  So far, it’s been very interesting, and at times challenging and exhausting…but it’s definitely made me a more well-rounded person, and has taught me priceless lessons about people, animals, and life in general.

The practice of surgery is unique because there are so many ways to do things, but they’re all based on using a finite set of equipment, and certain basic skills in combination.  Just lately, taking a step back, I can see how my duties as a surgeon have influenced the management of my personal finances. 

Sometimes, a chance to cut is a chance to cure

I apologize for not knowing who coined that phrase, but it certainly can have more than just the literal meaning.  In surgery, we sometimes have a chance to remove a tumour before it’s spread and ended a life, remove a foreign body that’s stuck where it shouldn’t be, or repair damaged tissue like a broken bone.  

In the case of our own finances, we need to sometimes endure painful cuts in the way we do things, and the sooner we make the changes, often the better the long term prognosis.  The events that put us in a bad financial place are often within our control, but sometimes they are not.  The good news is that there’s many choices and options out there to try and make things better, and chase that cure we’re looking for.

Use the skills you have to adapt to new situations

There have been quite a few times when a patient’s needed an emergency surgery I’d never done before, and I was the only one there to do it.  It scared me, especially in the early days, but then I’d realize that I knew the anatomy, the basic surgical techniques, had quite a few surgeries under my belt with some similarities, and had a textbook with a detailed guide of how to put these skills together and do that particular surgery.  I always prepare to the best of my ability, take a deep calming breath, and have never given anything less than my best.  Taking a practical approach to solving problems, and using the skills and resources available to me, has served me well, and allowed me to adapt to the change that always comes.

Over a lifetime, we will all face many challenges; some good, some very very bad, but ultimately that’s part of our journey.  I think that in the end, it’s how we live our lives that counts.  With every passing year, and every challenge we face, we acquire an arsenal of skills.  We need to learn to have faith, use this arsenal, and keep building on it to help deal with what comes up.  As we go through different stages of our lives, our financial situation and goals change, hopefully we can recognize this, and know that our skills can help us to adapt along the way.

Learn from every experience

Whether the outcome of the surgery was a success or a failure, I’ve learned that the real value for me comes from what I learned.  Being able to associate certain clinical signs with what’s going on inside the patient, removing a tumour and following up on the patient’s quality of life and survival time, or even having done everything perfectly, but having a patient that was too sick to recover; these are all lessons learned, and good or bad outcome, I’ve chosen to gain knowledge from every single experience, so nothing is in vain.  Sometimes, what you thought at the time was your biggest failure, can turn into one of your biggest successes because you really grew from it–I certainly felt that way when I lost my first patient to an underlying heart problem nobody could have detected from the outside.

I feel the same way about my personal finances.  Even when I make a good financial move, I try to figure out how I can do even better.  If I make a bad move, or a mistake, then I dissect it to try to figure out what I don’t want to do next time around.  We all make mistakes with our finances–no matter how hard some of us may try–nobody’s perfect.  Sometimes, the reward is just being able to look back and tell the story years later, knowing that you learned from it.

Taking risks isn’t exactly what I thought it would be

As a professional, I’ve dedicated myself to a life of ongoing learning.  I’ve also really looked at risk in a different way.  Sometimes, procedures or surgeries that I thought were risky for me to do, were a breeze for someone else who’d done it a thousand times.  Once I got over the initial learning curve and had done a certain challenging surgery myself, I began to understand that it’s not all so black and white.  See, what I’d learned about was taking educated risks:  In many “risky” situations, the risk is greatly reduced because you’ve educated yourself properly.  If you talk to a person who skydives, they may tell you that they take a very calculated risk:  They temper the danger by being meticulously prepared, and that the rush they get from it is totally worth it.

If I think about the arena of personal finance, I feel like the same idea applies.  For example, I know nothing about income trusts, so investing a large sum of money in the latest thing would be like skydiving without a parachute for me, but investing in a stock from a field I’m familiar with and that meets all of my criteria is relatively a much lower risk for me.  Why?  Because I know so much more about it.  There are no certainties in surgery or in finance (besides taxes), but all we can do is get the best information available, and make the best decisions based on what we know.

That I am far stronger, and more resilient than I ever thought possible

There have been times when I’ve been pushed to what I thought was my limit…one more dog that ate a tennis ball at the end of a 40 hour long-weekend…one more incident with porcupine quills.  I would often be exhausted, and just thankful that the day had finally ended.  When one day ends though, another one begins.  When I look back, I realize how amazing it is that I survived it, worked my butt off, helped a lot of patients, and always learned something…this does make it easier the next time around, and I find I can handle more with each passing year.  These experiences have helped me in the face of other challenges, and allowed me to overcome some of my biggest fears.

Especially for those of us who live in North America, there really is no limit to what can be accomplished thanks to the freedom and latitude we are so fortunate to have.  We live in a place where we all have an opportunity to become that next rags to riches story like what we see on TV. 

The truth is that every bad day does indeed come to an end, and whether we realize it at the time or not, we wake up the next day stronger for it.  I feel like there’s a choice to be had every morning when we wake up:  To keep going the way things are, or to try harder and find more answers than we had yesterday.  

Every now and then we hear amazing stories of people surviving horrible ordeals for sometimes weeks, months, and years at a time–but they never gave up hope that things would get better–and one day they did.  It also doesn’t hurt to lean on others and get a bit of help sometimes–it may even need to be professional help.  Just being alive might be the biggest gift of all, and we often take it completely for granted.  No matter what your goals are with your personal finances, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it might take some hard work, but you can get there–we all can. 

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