When should an aging doctor call it quits?

When are you going to retire, Doc? It’s a question I was asked several times a week. When it didn’t elicit a satisfactory answer, I would receive a variation on the same theme the next visit: How long are you going to do that commute? My patients knew that we had sold our house and moved to a condo closer to the city, which led to a 45-minute drive to and from my suburban office each day.