Kandice Kottke Marchant, MD, PhD

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Cara King:

Welcome back everyone to inspirations and insights. We hope you all are enjoying these longer days and warmer weather. On today's episode, we have the amazing Dr. Kandice Marchant. Dr. Marchant is recently retired and served as a Chair of the Institute of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and is Professor of Pathology at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine.

Dr. Cara King:

In this episode, she talks candidly about her resilient tools to manage grief, the isolation of being a leader, and the unprecedented way she stepped down from leadership which has allowed her to pursue her passion for cheese making and start her next chapter as a small business owner with a flourishing cheese shop on Cleveland's east side.

Dr. Cara King:

If you haven't stopped into the Marchant Manor Cheese Shop and tasted her variety of cheeses, you absolutely need to add it to your list. Without further ado, we hope you enjoy.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

Okay. Today we have a very special guest. We have Dr. Kandice Marchant. How are you, Kandice?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

I'm great. Mary, how are you?

Dr. Mary Rensel:

We're good. We're so glad to have you. I have a question about saying, "Yes" to new opportunities. So when I look at your CV and your history here at the Cleveland Clinic, wow. So you have gone from just a regular old resident, then a staff, then what? A Chair, then section head, then Institute Chair, and probably so many other stones jumping in between.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

So you say, "Yes" to new challenges where some people say, "No, no, that's too scary. I don't want to go there." So how... Our listeners out there, if they said, "I really want to say yes, but it's scary." What are some advice that you can give to our listeners about saying, "Yes" to new opportunities?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, I think saying, "Yes" is really important and one of the pathologists I worked with when I was a resident had me learning and signing out at the staff level when I was a resident and I said yes to a lot of opportunities early on as a resident. In fact, he used to have a phrase for me, the one song from the musical, "I'm just the girl who can't say no. I'm in a terrible tizz."

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And he would say, "You say yes to everything." And I think one piece of advice that I'd have for staff starting out is it's really good to say yes, initially. If there's opportunities that come along, if there are opportunities that look good for you. But as your career grows and you need to really concentrate on becoming an expert in one or more areas, start being really selective.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

If you're getting asked to give a talk in a tiny town with a no name society, that may be good initially for practice. But I think eventually you want to say, I want to be a reviewer for a high name journal, or I want to give a talk at a national meeting, little things build up. So initially I was saying yes to giving company talks or talks in local societies and it really was great practice, but I think eventually, you want to hook the really big opportunities.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

I love it. So practice, practice, and then use some strategy on what you say yes.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Absolutely.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

So it's to save your time and energy. And when you look back, what do you think were some of the yeses that you were kind of hesitant and then they really worked out? Some of the ones that really did open doors for you?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, I think that initially, there was one national meeting or an international meeting that I got asked to give a talk and it was in between two other talks and I had a fly to the west coast. Actually it was in Lake Tahoe, I think, and I didn't have time to do it. And I went out there and I thought, "Oh heck, this is just a no name society. Why am I doing this? And I'm flying back to Cleveland."

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

But it turned out to be a society that was unique. It was an International Society of Laboratory Hematology. Was tiny, it was maybe 50 people, but I met people from all over the world and I met hematologists, hematopathologists from Europe, from Asia, and they asked me to come back the next year and to give another talk.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And one thing led to the other over the years and eventually I became the executive secretary for this society and when the president of the society passed away suddenly, I wound up having to organize a meeting in Orlando and I organized the whole meeting and we just really didn't have many resources at the time, so I wound up doing the marketing and the advertising and the brochures and the syllabus.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And a couple years later, I ran another meeting in Amsterdam, so I got a chance to travel to that meeting. I had a meeting in Barcelona that I had to organize and then eventually became president of the society and grew it to a society of about 1000 people. And today it's one of the largest laboratory hematology societies.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So that was one of those things you agree to give a talk, you never know where it's going to lead.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

I love it. So life is full of surprises. Yes. I love it. As you increase these roles over time, you became a leader of people and what are some of the lessons that you've learned as a team leader, as a section head, and then an Institute Chair and building a building. So there must have been so many people involved with different roles. How did you navigate that and what advice can you share with our listeners about building people around you or enhancing the lives of others as they are building their skills, like you were building yours?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

I think it's really important as a leader who's developing and leading a large group to appreciate the qualities in many people. And often leaders will say, "The hardest thing about being a leader is people." You can manage numbers, you can manage budgets, you can manage operations, but managing people and playing to their strengths, I think is really important.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

One thing I found, especially becoming Institute Chair, is that it can be very lonely as a leader because at that level, it's hard to have a group of people that you can talk to and talk out anything and vet ideas because everybody's got their own agenda. And I think it's really important as you develop your leadership, is that to have some type of, some people call it board of directors, some people that you can feel free to talk to, people either in other institutes, ones who don't have an agenda necessarily in your leadership circle.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And I actually found that it was really helpful to have an executive coach. I got one of those as an Institute Chair and developed a really great relationship with her for many years and I found it as a really great impartial person that you could bounce ideas off of, rather than if you're trying to talk to, as an Institute Chair, your two department chairs, they have agendas and they may tell you what you want to hear and sometimes having somebody totally impartial is really good for that.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So I think that's one little piece of advice for developing leaders is have someone, it doesn't have to be somebody necessarily trained as an executive coach, but somebody who you trust, somebody who you admire, somebody who's impartial, that you can talk things through. I mean, that was also something very helpful for me. I think you probably know my husband passed away about eight years ago and initially I thought, "I don't need anybody to talk to. I'm strong. I can get through this. I'm fine with everything."

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

But I wound up having a woman who was a grief counselor, and I had the same experience with her that once a week or once every two weeks I could go and I could say anything. I could talk to her about things that I couldn't talk to my kids about. I couldn't talk to my department chairs about and a really good person like that doesn't lead you in one direction or another but they really serve as a sounding board for any ideas and things you really need to talk through.

Dr. Cara King:

Kandice, thank you so much for opening up about all of that. That I'm sure is really difficult to talk about and bring up, but it's so important, and that so many people out there are experiencing grief in their lives in many different ways and just talking about it and naming it, I think, is really important. So thank you so much for bringing that up.

Dr. Cara King:

In regard to having an executive coach or a grief counselor or somebody who's in more of a neutral territory, like you were saying, how do you recommend that we find these people in our lives? Do you have any ways that if people are looking for an executive coach or somebody that's neutral to talk with, how do you find these people?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, I think I got lucky with getting an executive coach because the clinic offered that service as a new Institute Chair. I think resources at the clinic I think are great. I think in the (OPSA) Transition Center, they now have access to executive coaches and WPSA should have some at least ideas of people who might work.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

I think having a colleague even, who is in another Institute who may be going through similar issues or striving for similar leadership positions can sometimes be very helpful as well. So I think it's not magic, there are resources, but I think having somebody you can either select that's objective and outside of your direct sphere.

Dr. Cara King:

You're so right in that sometimes breaking down these silos can be really complex, where we get so stuck. I'm within the Women's Health Institute. Sometimes just being within your Institute can put blinders on, which is why I love Mary coming over from Neurology and meeting people like you are just so inspirational outside of your day to day.

Dr. Cara King:

So I can't stress that enough. How important and invigorating it can be to get outside of your Institute and even outside of medicine, which brings me to my next question for you, outside of medicine.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Is there life outside of medicine?

Dr. Cara King:

Please tell me how this works, but you have an incredible passion outside of pathology. I mean, you have such a huge passion within cheese making, which I want to bring up next, if you're okay with that.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Yeah, no, that would be great. And a lot of people say, "How in the heck did you get interested in cheese making from medicine?" And for me, I'm from Wisconsin originally, and I know you are as well. Cheese was something that was a big part of my life growing up, you're at the cheese state.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

But cheese in my childhood was Velveeta and shrink wrapped cheddar and it wasn't until one year for Christmas, my husband gave me a trip to Murray's Cheese in New York City, and it's a huge cheese monger and they have their own cheese aging caves and there was something called Cheese Bootcamp. And Cheese Bootcamp was three days tasting 75 cheeses paired with beers and wines and learning all about the chemistry and microbiology. And during this, I had this “aha” moment. I realized that my specialty in medicine is in hematopathology and coagulation. I realized that the chemistry of turning milk into cheese curds was mirrored almost exactly by the chemistry of turning blood into blood clots.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And there are surprising chemical similarities between curds and clots and I was just totally fascinated by it. So I went home and there's a book by Harold McGee called “On Food and Cooking (The Science and Lore of the Kitchen)”and it's all the chemistry of cooking, and there's a whole chapter on dairy, and I just devoured this and then went home and started... I bought a book on cheese making and kind of like the “Julie Julia” thing where the woman buys Julia Child's cookbook and cooks her way through it. I cooked my way through this cheese making book and was trying all these different cheese experiments and lo and behold, the first, I'd say five of them, were total disasters. I couldn't get the milk to coagulate. I didn't realize ultra-pasteurized milk doesn't clot.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And eventually people started liking my cheeses and my kids would say, "Hey, these are really good." And I thought, "Oh heck, your kids always say your stuff is good." So I took some of my cheeses over to Ohio City Provisions on the (Cleveland’s) west side, and it's an all Ohio product shop and Trevor Clatterbuck, who's the owner there, he said, "These cheeses are really, really great. However, I'll do you one better. I have access to Guernsey milk at an Amish dairy in Stark County. Why don't you try making your cheeses with that milk?" And I did.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And I went home and being the scientist, I did a little experiment. My current milk, the new milk and different cheese styles and I brought all of these in and they were just blown away.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So it was one of those things I started thinking maybe this is something I could do as a retirement plan. I had stepped down recently in 2016/17 as Institute Chair and I was thinking, what do I want to do?" At the Cleveland Clinic, once you’re Institute Chair, what else do you want to do? Yeah, I can go back into clinical medicine, which I did, and I really love, but I didn't want to be CEO. I didn't want to be a hospital president. I thought, "Well maybe, I could eventually develop a cheese making business." And that's where the seeds started at that point.

Dr. Cara King:

I love this story so much and those cows. So I'm thinking about the randomized controlled trial that happened in your kitchen. I can just see how this is all unfolding. A quick RCT.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Yeah.

Dr. Cara King:

Talk to me about the cow’s milk. So did you notice anything different when you were making the cheese right away or was it just the final product that tasted different?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, no, it was right away. I mean, the cows that I use the milk from now are Guernsey cows from the Isle of Guernsey, in England, but now in the US, and they have a higher butter fat content and they have more beta carotene. So it's like the compound, the mixed carrots orange, it makes this cheese, or the milk quite yellow. So compared to your standard dairy milk at the grocery store, which is largely white and Holstein, it's very commoditized milk. This is very rich. It's very flavorful. So instantly you can see it. I see it in the vat every week when I make cheese now. Especially in May and June, it's even more yellow because they're out in the field eating these little yellow flowers. So the milk is even more yellow at certain times of the year.

Dr. Cara King:

That blows my mind. The body is amazing. Nature is amazing, right? I mean their diet impacts their milk that greatly, that's amazing.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

It really is. It really is cool. I also make cheese out of goat milk and goat milk is completely different. It's very white. It has no beta kerotene. The fat micelles are much smaller so it doesn't separate. Like if you buy cream top milk, you get the cream floating on the top. It's because the fat micelles in the cow milk are so huge, they float. Goat milk doesn't do that, so the cheese character is completely different.

Dr. Cara King:

I love this so much coming. Like I said, I lived in Madison for five years, you're speaking my language. And then you went to Vermont, Sterling College, and all my family lives outside of Burlington. So that's also country that I am very, very much in love with and when I was doing some research on you last night, I was looking up the Jasper Hill farm that you spent time on. That farm is gorgeous.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

It's incredible. It's incredible. That was kind of the thing that really kick started my cheese making and it was after my husband passed away and I really wanted to... I was looking for things to fill my time off. And I took this two week course at Sterling College paired with Jasper Hill Farms. There was a French cheesemaker, that came over and he goes by the moniker, the cheese ninja.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And actually, he taught me to do a ninja cut in the vat of the cheese curds. It's really, really sort of fun. But the course was incredible because we spent some time in the classroom learning all the chemistry, and then we went to Jasper Hill Farms. And for those of you who've had their cheeses, and you could get them at Wholefoods in a lot of places, their fabulous cheeses.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

But they have this incredible aging facility. It's six huge caves that they borrowed into the side of a mountain in Vermont that are about 100 meters long. Each of them have different temperatures and humidities and age different types of cheeses. So it was their processes are just really incredible. They're the only cheese maker I know that has a microbiology lab on site and they hire a microbiologist and what they're trying to do is, you know how cheeses have mold on the outside of the cheese? They're trying to recreate the microbiome of native raw milk so that if the government ever outlaws raw milk cheeses, they could recreate raw milk cheese based on their growth of all these different organisms. So they're really visionary.

Dr. Cara King:

Wow. You're making me realize what a marriage between cheese making and science and what we do. It just speaks our language. It's incredible.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

It's one of the little known facts about cheese making. It's really scientific.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

I love it. And strategic and visionary. It's very neat. So tell me this, now that you are a business owner with a place that we can all go, we can go frequent. With a cute patio and we can have cheese and wine and beer and enjoy our time there. Yes. Okay. So it's, Marchant Manor Cheese, in Cleveland Heights? Is that right?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Yeah. In Cleveland Heights.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

Cleveland Heights. So let's meet there, Cara. You and I. We're in.

Dr. Cara King:

I live in Cleveland Heights.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

100%.

Dr. Cara King:

I am going to be there tonight.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

And the kids are coming. Just to warn you, her kids will be there.

Dr. Cara King:

Five, three, and one. Nothing can go wrong in this situation. It's all right.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

Tell me what you think about when you think you’re a new business owner and when we think of a doc, a medical documentation. Do you think that's a big jump to go from medicine to business? Or do you feel like we have that growth mindset? Like you talked about running meetings and you did the marketing and the advertising.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

Do you think that in medicine, we learn some business skills and we're not even realizing it? Or what do you think about that?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, I think that's definitely true and especially in leadership positions, like department chairs and Institute chairs. Developing budgets, keeping to the budget, doing the financial analysis, dealing with the human resources and a lot of the HR things. The continuous improvement. All of that is really, really helpful in a small business.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

The one real difference though, is in a small business, the buck stops with you and you develop the strategic plan, you're responsible financially. I now run my own payroll, I've never run payroll as an Institute Chair. But I think there are a lot of things in medicine. The hard work ethic, the ability to work in teams, I think is all really important for running a small business.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

But I learn stuff every day now having this business, it's really interesting. And one of the things from just a cheese making part of the business and any food business, you have a lot of regulatory. And as the Institute Chair, and I was the lab director for the main campus, so was responsible for all the regulatory things, and a lot of that was really good training for all of the regulatory things for a dairy business.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

I love that. So when looking back at your CV, I saw way, way back that when you were a resident, you won an innovation award, and that was maybe with a grant that you were on. I don't know if it was the one that you were on with your husband but I love that your innovative spirit goes back from the beginning. So you've always had this and now as a business owner.

Dr. Mary Rensel:

But one thing I wanted to go back to is being on an NIH grant with your husband, how many people do you know where a husband and wife team is on a NIH grant? Is that something you've heard before?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

I think there are, and it was very interesting. Meeting Roger was really one of the changing points in my life because obviously we got married, but we worked for the same PhD advisor as grad students. So we were in the same research lab as grad students. Now the research that we did was in essentially artificial organs or biomaterial implants and we were doing studies on how to do surface modification of cardiovascular implants either to prevent thrombosis or to develop incorporation of smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Now Roger was the chemist and interestingly he was English and in England, when you're in high school, you pick very small tracks of courses to take. So he got all the way through college and into his PhD program with never taking a biology class, never.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So he was doing this project on implant devices and he was a crack chemist, he was excellent, but he was doing implant studies and he was having to look at these exudates under the microscope. And he's like, "What are these purple things?" I was like, "Those are lucacytes, we're starting at the beginning."

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So it was a good collaboration because I was the biologist and I knew the biological sciences. He was the chemist and knew the chemistry so that it worked well on an NIH collaboration. We collaborated for about 20 years on different NIH grants. My kids always talk about it because he worked at (Case Western Reserve University) Case, he was a professor in biomedical engineering and I was at the (Cleveland) Clinic. So we didn't see each other during the day very often. So we talked science at night, especially during dinner.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And one of the grants that we had was on Von Willebrand disease and imaging it with an atomic force microscope so you could actually see small molecular changes. And my kids to this day said we learned so much about Von Willebrand factor over dinner from you and daddy talking about it.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So it was one of those things, the whole family kind of got involved in the... But one of the things about working with your husband on an NIH grant, if you have any other co-investigator and they ask you to do something, it's always a bit of a negotiation and it's a discussion. If your husband says, "You need to do this by tomorrow and we've got to get this done," it's really hard to say no. So there are things that are different, I think, about working with your spouse compared to another co-investigator.

Dr. Cara King:

That's really funny. There's no like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I have a meeting tonight." Because he's like, "I see you at the dinner table, you don't." Exactly right. And you have two kids. Is that right?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

I do.

Dr. Cara King:

Two daughters?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

I do, yes. Two daughters.

Dr. Cara King:

Two daughters. And did they go into anything science or medicine? I'm just curious.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Absolutely not. No, it was interesting. My oldest daughter has a PhD in Communications from Penn at the Annenburg School for Communication and she really didn't enjoy medicine or science, but she's very good at math and she was very good at... She did politics and economics, so a lot of mathematics as an undergrad. And she was very interested in developing countries. So currently, she works for Facebook doing research on usability for Facebook in developing countries.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And my other daughter is an artist and has a master in glass and ceramics and sculpture and currently works for a lighting design firm in Berkeley. In fact, my oldest daughter just moved out to California this last week. Pandemic works in amazing ways. So she'd been doing postdoc in Oxford and during the pandemic last September came home because she got the Facebook job and she could work remotely and she actually lived with me for 11 months. So I was amazed that my adult daughter could come home and live with me for 11 months. Without the pandemic, she never would have.

Dr. Cara King:

Those little silver linings. Get to know your daughter again.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Cara King:

I saw your house featured in this beautiful spread. Your house is just absolutely gorgeous. I know you live in Cleveland Heights and the historic homes there, they blow my mind. But there was an image of a sculpture in your house and I was like, "Wow, that sculpture's beautiful." And then I read the footnote and sure enough, your daughter had done that and I was just so amazed that she's just incredibly gifted and skilled.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, that's great. Actually, this house is a really interesting house. It was written up in the Plain Dealer about two years ago. It was originally owned by Dr. Henry John and now that this is the 100th year Anniversary of the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. John was the first Lab Director of the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So he had my job as essentially Institute Chair 100 years ago. When I first came through this house, I was really struck by a lot of the architectural details. There's a lot of wood carving, very interesting carving on all the wood paneling. And I came back a second time to look at the house and on the mantle in the master bedroom was a letter written from the former owner to the historical society, trying to get the house on the historical register.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And they said that it had been owned by a Dr. Henry John who had worked at the Cleveland Clinic. So I went home and I Googled, like you would, and his name came up and indeed, he was one of the first doctors. He wasn't one of the founders, but he was one of the first doctors and he was the initial lab director. He was also in the medicine department and was one of the first doctors in the US to use insulin on patients.

Dr. Cara King:

Wow, I just got goosebumps.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So it's a fabulous historical house and he actually founded a camp for kids with diabetes called Camp Ho Mita Koda out on Auburn Road, near Chardon. And he was so fascinated by the woodworking in this house that he became a woodworker himself and he built a wood shop behind the house, which is still here and he carved totem poles for the camp. If you go to Camp Ho Mita Koda, the totem poles out there are from Dr. John.

Dr. Cara King:

Wow.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

It's really weird living in a house with that kind of history.

Dr. Cara King:

Right. I mean, what are the chances of that? The brain power that's gone on in the library, in your house? The things that were thought up, it blows your mind.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

The library's pretty cool. It looks like something out of a medieval castle.

Dr. Cara King:

Wow. See, he was a woodworker. You're a cheesemaker. You both have these things with your hands you're doing outside of work. I love this story. All right, we just have a couple minutes left and I just want to wrap up with some final words about the next steps in your life. So I know you went part-time recently to focus more on your cheese making and the plan is for retirement in January (2022). Is that right?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

It is. Yes, it is.

Dr. Cara King:

What a huge transition. Talk to us about how that transition's coming up, how you're doing mentally with this. What are you thinking?

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, I'm a planner and I had planned all of this at the time I stepped down as Institute Chair because at that time I was starting to really make the cheese well and I wanted to do something different. So I had a long term plan of transitioning back into clinical medicine and then developing this cheese business.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So when I went part-time, which was about two years ago, then I could ramp up my cheese making on the weekends. But in the transition, I didn't want to leave prematurely. I wanted to leave the clinic in a good spot for the hemostasis lab. It's a complicated lab and I wanted to make sure that there was a good transition period.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So in talking with the current Institute Chair and the Department Chair, I said I think it's really necessary to recruit someone who's very well known in hemostasis so that we can work together for a couple month transition and then I'll leave it in good hands.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And we recruited Dr. Morayma Reyes Gil from Montefiore in New York and she's actually starting next month in hemostasis. So I had planned that there would be a good transition. She's great at teaching residents. She's good at doing research. So I think I'll feel really good at this point. I didn't want to leave cold turkey. It's nice to be able to retire and choose when you're going to do it. I think that a lot of people... I know a lot of people want to work till they drop and that's great, but I really wanted to leave on my own terms and retired when I was still well thought of and well appreciated so that I could dictate this is a good time to transition and to leave.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

So I'm happy with the decision. It was a little strange this week because I moved out of my office and I moved into a cubicle and I've sort of come full circle. I had a cubicle as a resident and then you moved into Department Chair offices and Institute Chair offices back into a clinical office and now I'm in a cubicle. And I'm happy with that because it's, I think, a good transition to have the new doc come in and have the office near the lab and really get to know the people with the laboratory. So it's all part of the plan.

Dr. Cara King:

Well, I just value you so much and just seeing the trajectory that you went on and we wonder, once you reach the pinnacle of whatever in your mind, what the pinnacle is in your career. Institute Chair would be many people's pinnacle. What happens after that? And it's just so inspiring to see you just pivot and own this really exciting new part of your life and still have such an incredible future ahead of you that's outside of medicine, it's just truly inspiring.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Well, thank you. One of the things that came out of it too, was talking with Sue Rehm (MD, Associate Chief of Staff), who I've admired for many, many years about the transition. And initially, I was talking to her and she developed this Transition Center in part, I think, because of a conversation I had with her at one time, because I had said, "What does the clinic do for people who've finished a leadership position? How do you come up with other engaging things for them to do?"

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

And there are a lot of resources I think through this (Transition) Center now to help people, not just retirement, but transitioning out of one leadership position, maybe into a different leadership position. Or looking for community things to do or education or other research opportunities and I think it's a really super thing that she's done.

Dr. Cara King:

And that's just one thing of many being here at the (Cleveland) Clinic and having WPSA here and having all these different institutes and resources, just how supported we are as staff here. I feel very fortunate to have these type of resources around us. All right, I think that's all the time we have Kandice. We cannot thank you enough for spending your afternoon with us and we hope to have you back sometime soon. We'll see you soon at your cheese shop for certain.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Yep, come by. We'll be there.

Dr. Cara King:

Can't wait.

Dr. Kandice Marchant:

Thank you.