IT IS the bittersweet end of an era for the generations of patients that Dr Denis Gordon has cared for at his Belmont practice in the past 53 years.
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But at 80 years old, the popular GP says it is time to step away from the stethoscope and retire.
There were different pockets of Australia to explore, old friends to visit, a house to build, and more golf to play.
But he would miss his patients, who had become like family over the years.
“I will miss coming to work,” he said. “I won’t miss waking up in the middle of the night wondering whether I ordered a test or not though.
“When you know people that long, you really worry about them. It is a bit like they are in your own family.”
Dr Gordon followed in the footsteps of his father, Dr Neil Gordon, who bought the practice in 1936.
Between them, they cared for the Belmont community from the Glover Street Surgery site for more than 80 years.
When Dr Gordon was born in 1937, the family lived at the back of the practice.
“It is a special place,” Dr Gordon said.
“Some people might think it’s a bit old fashioned for a general practice, but the thing you look for in a doctor’s practice is not what the rooms are like, but what the doctors inside it are like.”
He has delivered hundreds of babies, treated tens of thousands of patients, and has watched on with wonder as advances in the medical industry made it easier to diagnose and treat diseases earlier.
“In my forties I was going to retire because I had bought a fair bit of real estate early in my life, and I was getting frustrated at not being able to diagnose things,” Dr Gordon said.
“We didn’t have cat scans or ultrasounds, so those things weren’t there to assist us. You could send a patient off to see a surgeon thinking they had gall bladder trouble, only to find out they had cancer and it had spread too far, because there was no way of diagnosing it any earlier.”
Dr Gordon, and his wife Robin – who worked as a nurse in the surgery too – have been active members of the Belmont community.
He was the Lakes United and surf club doctor too.
“I have been living in the home my father built in 1951, and I practiced from the surgery my father bought in 1936. So I haven’t shifted far,” Dr Gordon laughed.
Some of his patients had been in his kindergarten class. Others, now aged in their sixties, he had been treating since they were seven.
“There are a few patients who have been getting a bit tearful about me leaving,” he said. “But I’ve got two partners, who have been here for a few years, who will take over. I know my patients will be in safe hands, because I’ll be going to them too.”
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