Seven years into retirement, I assumed I had successfully left gastroenterology behind.
Apparently my subconscious did not get the memo.
The dream began normally enough. I was back in an endoscopy suite performing a colonoscopy—something I had done thousands of times over the course of my career. The setting felt completely authentic: the soft hum of equipment, the glowing monitor, the familiar choreography of scope, suction, insufflation, and gentle navigation through the turns of the colon.
Then I saw it.
A polyp.
Even in my dream I was pleased. Muscle memory kicked in immediately. The snare went out, the polyp was captured cleanly, and I dropped it neatly into the retrieval basket. A textbook polypectomy.
At that point I looked up.
I was no longer in the endoscopy center.
I was standing in a park.
The colonoscope was still in my hands. The basket still contained the polyp. But the patient had completely vanished, as had the endoscopy suite. No nurse, no monitor, no stretcher—just me, the scope, and what appeared to be a perfectly pleasant public park.
Dream logic, as usual, provided no explanation.
I remember thinking: Well, this is unusual.
The next scene shifted again. Now I was back in the endoscopy center, but the situation had somehow become worse. The patient had apparently gotten up and left. The room was empty. I was standing there holding a colonoscope and a specimen basket with a polyp that seemed to belong to no one.
And I was thinking: What exactly am I supposed to do now?
Do I call pathology?
Do I track down the patient?
Do I go back to the park and see if he’s still there?
This was the precise moment I woke up.
Later that same day I spoke with a 90-year-old retired radiologist. He practiced for decades and read thousands upon thousands of studies during his career.
He told me something interesting.
He still dreams about radiology.
Not just occasionally—frequently. In his dreams he’s interpreting films, attending departmental meetings, or planning new hospital ventures. He hasn’t practiced in years, but the machinery of the profession keeps running somewhere in the back of his mind.
Apparently the professional brain never fully powers down.
The whole thing reminded me of another type of dream that many of us have had since our student days.
The classic academic nightmare.
You’re suddenly sitting in a final exam. The room is silent. The test is handed out. And then you realize—with a sinking feeling—that you never attended the class all semester. You don’t recognize the material. You don’t know the subject. You may not even know what course you’re taking.
Yet somehow you are expected to pass the final.
For decades that dream would occasionally pop up in my sleep. It’s the brain’s way of replaying the anxiety of responsibility long after the actual responsibility has disappeared.
My colonoscopy-in-the-park dream felt like the medical version of that exam nightmare.
Somewhere in my subconscious I am still responsible for the polyp.
Medicine leaves deep grooves in the brain. When you spend forty years making decisions, solving problems, and being responsible for other people’s outcomes, those patterns become part of the architecture of the mind.
You may retire.
But the brain occasionally clocks back in.
Sometimes that means interpreting radiology films at age ninety. Sometimes it means taking an exam for a class you never attended.
And sometimes it means standing in a park holding a colonoscope and a very nicely retrieved polyp—wondering where the patient went.
