In this episode of The Good News with Angie Austin, we delve into the incredible journey of Dr. Michael McGee, an immigrant surgeon, and author of the memoir Great Joys, Great Sorrows. Dr. McGee shares the fascinating account of his experiences navigating surgical residency in the United States after leaving his homeland with nothing but medical training and hopes. The challenges weren’t just professional; his personal life included growing up across multiple cultures, from Egypt to Germany, and dealing with significant hardships. These stories form the crux of his book, which he wrote for his grandchildren to understand their
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hello there, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news. Well, I’m really excited about this book today that we’re going to be talking about and the author. The book is titled Great Joys, Great Sorrows, An Immigrant’s Journey Through Surgical Residency. And I’ve always kind of been curious, is residency like as bad as they say? And I was I was reading about Dr. McGee’s residency up to 110 hours a week. I was like, oh, my goodness, Doc, it really is as bad as they say. Welcome.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you. Thank you so much for the honor of talking to you.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, I love the whole journey, first of all. And when I read that you wrote this for your grandkids, this is a part four of A Surgeon’s Tale, Joy’s Great Sorrows book. And that really touched my heart because I did interviews with my father before he passed away. And he had his PhD, was a very intelligent man who had a lot of accomplishments. But He had we were estranged for 35 years due to his unfortunate situation with alcohol. But with that said, we had eight great years at the end. And I really tried to reserve some of this story for my kids. And I’m doing the same with my mom. And I think that is one of the best gifts you can give your grandchildren. Because to be honest with you, what I went through as a kid and what you went through as a kid, you and I have now provided for my children, your grandchildren, a life that beyond our wildest dreams. And so what you experienced, your grandchildren will never experience the hardships that you went through to get, you know, as an immigrant coming to this country and getting the education you did. So what a gift you’re giving them so that they’ll truly appreciate what you went through to then create a life for your children and your grandchildren that you have here in the U.S.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, I have four wonderful grandchildren, two living in Denver. Oh, wow. Two living in Rochester, New York. And they range from age… My oldest grandson is 16 and is beginning to look at colleges and wondering what he should do. And then I have a 14-year-old granddaughter also in Rochester who is into acting and wishes to go to New York City to the acting school there. Then in Denver… I have two wonderful grandkids, a daughter, Natalie, if I may mention the name, who is into skiing, into mathematics, into science, because her father is also a surgeon and her mother is a fantastic nurse working at the hospital in Colorado. And a grandson who is 10 years old and he’s breaking the mold because he wants to become a professional.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, he is breaking the medical mold now. Okay, so this is the fourth book in your surgeon’s tale. So give us an overview of what you’re going to tell us about in Great Joy’s Great Sour’s Immigrant’s Journey Through Surgical Residency.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, the story begins really when my wife, Victoria… And I traveled from London to Boston. And this is in 1970. And we carried the only thing that we have with us when we arrived in New York is hope and medical training, two steamer trunks and $48. Now, $48 in 1970 was a lot of money. So we thought we were quite rich. Anyway, our marriage had been already strained because she was one year behind me in medical school, and so our internships in London had been a different hospital at different times. And even though we were married, we were both fatigued from studying and passing exams and so on and so forth. And then we came to Boston, and we had to adapt very rapidly to the American way of life. We had no support system in the sense that we didn’t have a family that we could go to. We had very limited funds because we learned that you get paid at the end of the month rather than at the beginning. And very grueling medical schedules. Now, she went to the Boston Children’s Hospital to do a pediatric residency. And I went to what was then called the Peter and Brigham Hospital Hospital. uh, which was one of the, uh, Harvard hospitals, um, to do surgical training. And I learned very quickly that surgery in the United States was so much different than the surgery I’d been exposed to in, in England. Really? In England, there was a sense of, uh, you know, a hierarchy. There was a sense of history, um, Whereas in the United States, people were interested in fast-moving innovation, and they were driven by the dollar sign rather necessarily than attending to patients as we did in England. Interesting.
SPEAKER 05 :
And I understand you not just spent time in England and obviously here in the U.S., but born and raised in Egypt and Germany. So you’ve really lived all over the world.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. My mother was German and my father was Egyptian. So there were some interesting cultural challenges in our growing up. And my mother disliked living in Egypt. So At the age of four, when I was four, she persuaded my father to find a job who was a professor of Arabic in England. And so she and my father lived in England, and she literally dumped us with her aging parents in post-war Germany in 1948. Whoa. Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, that’s a pretty stark change.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, and you learn very quickly to survive. You learn very quickly to learn a new language. You learn very quickly to try and adapt in order to fit in. And you learn compassion. You learn looking at my grandparents… They were elderly. They had gone through World War I. They had gone through the Depression. They had gone through hyperinflation. They’d gone through World War II. They’d survived all that. And now in the retirement ages, suddenly had to raise a four-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl. And it was tough for them. And even though it was tough for us to be abandoned emotionally from our parents, my grandmother became my surrogate mother. Yeah, I can imagine. I’m sorry, just talking about it. Things like some very difficult moments. So anyway, you learn how difficult it is for them to raise young kids. And that’s where the kernel of compassion comes into my life. So that’s when I had the opportunity to be trained, go to medical school in London and and then get a scholarship to go to Mass General to do a surgical residency. And from there, since I wanted to do research, they said, you have to go to the Brigham. And I did. I applied, and to my utter surprise, I had a wonderful interview with the chief of surgery, Dr. Francis Moore, and he accepted me there and then on the spot. And it was the first time I… became aware of the incredible hospitality and love that the American nation, the American concept, the American people have for immigrants.
SPEAKER 05 :
Ah. You know, OK, a couple of things I want to ask. And I know, you know, obviously you’re extremely intelligent. I know Harvard is part of your background as well. And with your grandparents, they obviously did a good job, despite the fact that they’d had so many hardships and that your grandmother instilled that compassion in you. How long were you with your grandparents? Did they completely raise you or did you leave them at a certain time after the ages of you four and your sister seven?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, they raised us for five years. Wow. And, you know, when my mother came back to collect us to go to live with my father in England at the age of, I was nine years old, I was a thoroughly German boy. I had been indoctrinated into German culture. I’d gone to great school in Germany. And I thought to myself, who is this woman? I don’t really know her.
SPEAKER 03 :
Why would I want to go with her? Why would I want to go to England and learn a new language when I’m German?
SPEAKER 04 :
And so it was difficult to be taken away. In my memoirs, I do describe that I felt I was being torn away from my loving family. grandmother and taken to England where I faced all the challenges again of this relocation and learning a new language and trying to find friends and the usual thing that happens when one moves from one culture to another.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wow. So from Egypt to Germany to England and then the U.S. And then were you able, did you get to see your grandparents again after you left at the age of nine or was that the last time you saw them? No.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, I kept in touch with them all my life because I felt my German grandmother, who we call Oma in German, was my mother. And so I was estranged with my biological mother. There was a distance between us that we gulfed, we could never really film. And this is interwoven into the story of residency, etc. Because at one stage, I… At the Children’s Hospital, we rotated through different services from the Peter Ben Brigham to the Children’s Hospital. And at one stage, I find myself at the Children’s Hospital learning pediatric surgery under tremendous giants like Professor Robert Gross and other giants who influenced my life and who taught me the skill of surgery. But I am treating children who… are taken away from the home because of difficulties. And they are the same age that I was when I was abandoned by my mother. So there’s a tremendous amount of compassion and care and almost burnout. And you know, I don’t drink, and I used to think I want to go home and just… These poor children were the ward of the state. They had been taken away from their family because of mistreatment. And they were alone by themselves in the hospital, and I would spend as much of my free time with them. And there was particularly one girl who had cystic fibrosis, and we knew that she would not survive. And her name was Annabelle. And in my book, I reproduce Annabelle Lee, the poem by Edgar Allan Poe. So one of the ways I dealt with the pressures of surgery and the way that I dealt with children that had hopeless problems was by reading poetry. and listening to classical music. And I interweave that between my endless accounts of surgery, which is, of course, what the book is about, namely my residency and how I learned surgery and how I became from a young, inexperienced person
SPEAKER 05 :
surgeon or an experienced doctor into a mature surgeon you know we have to take a break um doc um we’re talking about uh the uh the volume four of a surgeon’s tale great joys great sorrows an immigrant’s journey through surgical uh residency dr michael mcgee and we will be right back with the good news
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 05 :
All right, we’re continuing our conversation here on The Good News with Angie Austin about a very interesting book. And I’ll kind of recap a little bit if you’re just joining us. We’re talking to Dr. Michael McGeed, and this is Volume 4 of A Surgeon’s Tale, his book titled Great Joys, Great Sorrows, An Immigrant’s Journey Through Surgical Residency. So, Doc, you’re treating these children who’ve been abused at a children’s hospital. And you yourself, you know, are remembering, you know, being abandoned by your parents when you were four and left with your taken from Egypt to Germany and left with your grandparents having to learn a new language and then, you know, just being abandoned. And then at nine, your mom comes to get you. You don’t even you barely know her and you want to you love your grandmother and then you have to go to England and again, learn a new language, etc., And obviously, you’re a very intelligent person, Harvard educated, a surgeon, an author. But the hardships of a nine year old trying to, you know, learn new language would also make friends in a new culture. So now here you are a doctor and you’re treating these abused children and you’re reliving these memories and you’re so sad. But then you’re working one hundred and ten hours a week, basically working. The shift of three people, basically, you know, three 40-hour work weeks. So you’re exhausted. You’re like ready to crack. So this is a lot emotionally and physically and mentally. So when they say that, you know, a residency is difficult, you really went through it.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right. And, you know, I’m so glad that nowadays the residents, the surgical residents have unions. at the hospitals where I trained, and they now cannot work more than 70 hours a week, and the unions negotiate for them. In our days, we were told by our mentors, who were really the giants of surgery at the time, that you are lucky because when they were training, they had to live in the hospital and stay there every single day. That’s where the word residency comes from. Ah, I see. And they said, you are lucky you can go home every other night, except by the time we finished our work, it would be eight or nine in the evening that we got home, at which time we just wanted to crash and sleep and catch up on sleeping. That’s why the book begins with the 110-hour rules. that residents have to follow in order to survive. And this was put together by the residents. Namely, you eat when you can, you sleep when you can, and you read when you can, and you go to the bathroom when you can, and you go home when you can, and you have sex when you can. Don’t stand if you sit, and don’t sit if you can lie down. And don’t stay awake when you can sleep, and don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. and don’t mess with the pancreas, et cetera. And then two more things I just want to mention. We had a saying, a good operation is better than good sex, and a bad operation is worse than cold pizza. And finally, if there’s a fight between you and a nurse, the nurse always wins because you are replaceable and nurses are not. Oh, that is funny.
SPEAKER 05 :
Golden rule. You talk about endurance in the book, and obviously endurance played a huge role during that period of your life and just discipline.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes.
SPEAKER 05 :
You also talk about medical decisions and ethics and things like that, and that sometimes there were ethical dilemmas where you felt one way and another person felt another way. And I think your background of living in different countries and with different relatives and kind of feeling that way uh emotional loss you know of you know being let down by some of the people that should have been caring for you maybe made you more compassionate was that a struggle at times when you know we just assume oh you know doctors always do the right thing but their opinions differ on what you know you think is the right thing compared to what someone else thinks is the right thing yeah
SPEAKER 04 :
You phrased it very nicely. Ethics is not due to the lack of clear choices. You know, you’re in an operation and you’re dealing with something. It is not a clear choice. Either way is possible. and there is no right decision. But the key thing, the overriding thing that one has to deal with is to remember that you are dealing with a patient, and you must always keep the patient’s welfare in mind, and that comes first. And that if you’re dealing with hard and difficult decisions, you have to tell the patient afterwards. I’ll give you a very brief example, if I may, We had a patient who was a Jehovah’s Witness. And before the operation, he clearly told me he did not want any blood. That’s the question we asked. Do you want blood? No. And we were dealing with a heart problem. Oh, boy. And we lost so much blood that this patient’s life was at stake. Now, the patient said, no, he didn’t want blood. But I had been instructed by my professor beforehand to cross match three units of blood to have it ready. And he turned around to the anesthetist and said, give him blood. And I said, sir, the patient did not want blood. And he looked at me, he said, we’re giving him blood to save his life. And we gave him blood. But after the operation, and I made a note of that in the chart, but after the operation, I went to the patient. I said, Mr. Smith, we were in a difficult situation, and we gave you blood to save your life. And I fully expected to be blasted. And he said to me, thank you.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, interesting.
SPEAKER 04 :
These are the dilemmas you face. during an operation, and there are many others in the book where we face difficult situations, but the patient’s welfare comes first. And despite religious and ethical considerations, we do consider the patient’s welfare first.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I think that you kind of have to. I mean, it’s interesting. I think in my own brain, you know, what I would have done, and that’s what I would have done as well. But you just don’t know until you’re in this situation, you know, what choice you’re going to make. And maybe if you would have had a physician in there who had the same religious beliefs, maybe they would have said, absolutely not, we can’t do that. So, wow. I mean, just the decisions that you have to make in that split second. And also… I always wonder about, especially with children, one of my relatives is a chaplain at a children’s hospital, and actually she just took a new job, and now she is the chaplain for a hospice, and she said to me, my job is so much easier now because I’m helping people to transition jobs. who have led a long, full life, and I’m helping them to transition. And, you know, it’s very fulfilling, and it’s easier than my last job. And I said, you’re the only person I know that could say being a chaplain at a hospice for dying people is easier than your last job, you know, dealing with children and the children’s parents. And I’m like, but, you know, it’s all relative. And so you also have to deal with so many sorrows. Then is that balanced, doctor, by, you know, the successes?
SPEAKER 04 :
That is balanced because, you know, we are not taught in medical school how to deal with death and dying. And we are certainly not taught about grief. So when your first patient dies… You have tremendous amount of guilt and you wonder, did I do anything wrong or did we do something wrong or did we make the wrong decision? Right. And then there is the period of grief. You know, grief has no timetable. It just comes on at various times. And so this is where endurance comes in. You have to pick yourself up and say, okay, we have another problem. We have to get on with this. And it is not ego. It is humanity. You have to learn to take care of the patient. and their best interest. Endurance is not the absence of fatigue or the ability. It is really the ability of keeping going despite of fatigue and moral issues that crop up. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 05 :
What is… You wrote this book partially for your grandchildren to know about your journey living in these different countries, being an immigrant surgeon here in the U.S. What are some of the most fulfilling things about your life and your career? And I know I was also intrigued by how difficult it was when you and your wife first moved here and had so little money. Here you are, doctors, but you’re not making very much money yet and really struggling, which to me is like, wow. We wouldn’t think that two doctors would be struggling, but you said you got paid at the end of the month. So talk about some of the most difficult things you experienced and also the most fulfilling in your career and your life journey.
SPEAKER 04 :
The most fulfilling things. It’s the ability to, the joy one gets by helping patients overcome difficulties. Every patient we meet, every human being we meet is dealing with some little battle. But patients are dealing with physical problems. that maybe extend to the fulfillment of what I wanted to say is existentialism. Am I going to survive this operation? All of us have undergone an operation. All of us have seen a doctor, and we wonder, are we going to survive this operation? And I have in the book seven questions you need to ask a surgeon before you go under the knife. And so the benefit, the joys that we had was when a patient survives and thrives and sends you a note saying, thank you for helping me through this difficulty. And the sorrows that we meet are when you deal with colleagues who are selfish, egocentric, who deal with ego more than with desire. patient’s needs to them in operation that makes them think they are going to shine when in fact it’s at the expense of the patient. It’s not a good operation. So these are These are the sorrows that we meet. We regret them. We regret the errors that are made. And I was a patient myself last year and I was in hospital and I was given the wrong medication despite my objection. And as a result of that, I had a misadventure and I had to stay, instead of an outpatient, I became an inpatient. I had to go to the care unit, so on and so forth. So these mishaps occur. And I think residents, I learned most of my correct decision-making, believe it or not, not from medical school, but from the nurses. The nurses are a well of wisdom. They are sure, they have learned things, they have seen things, they know what is the correct decision to make, and they are worth their weight in gold. So the nurses were a very important part of one’s education. In addition to one finds, one gravitates towards individuals, physicians, surgeons, who are indeed doctors. wise and who are compassionate and who guide you through the difficulties that we face as we educate ourselves. By the way, The education that you acquire as a surgeon is your own responsibility. You have to remain up to date. You have to remain informed and educated. You own your own education if you want to continue to be a successful surgeon.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s a really good point. Now, in terms of your grandkids… I’m just so touched. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. I can’t believe we’ve already run out of time. But I hope they really enjoy this. I know they’re going to get a lot out of it. I think you left such a wonderful legacy for them in the years to come that not only your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, et cetera, will be able to read your book, Great Joys, Great Sorrows, An Immigrant’s Journey Through Surgical Residency. Dr. Michael McGee, will you give us a website where we can find out more?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, my website is quite simple. Go to Google and type in michaelmageed.com. And it will get you to my four books and to the fifth one that I’m currently writing, which is called More Joys, More Sorrows. And I am proud to tell you, Angie, that Great Joys, Great Sorrows has been the best selling memoir at Amazon for the last two months. Oh, I love it. Reading it and enjoying it. It is almost free on Amazon. Kindle, and it is available as Audible as well.
SPEAKER 05 :
Excellent. And then McGeed, Michael McGeed, M-E-G-U-I-D, M-E-G-U-I-D. Thank you so much, Doctor. What a blessing to have you on the program.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER 02 :
You’re welcome. Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
