Michael Jones at his Church Hill home
Before retiring in 2020 at age 61, Michael Jones had been a gastroenterologist for 28 years. Exhausted with the health care system and his rigorous schedule as a physician, he hung up his stethoscope and picked up a pen, guitar and microphone to write poetry and short stories and play bass with a local band. He also hosts a wellness podcast, “Consults Over Coffee.”
“I’m like a 61-year-old bohemian now,” Jones says with a laugh.
Today, Jones regularly plays bass guitar with his band, The Blue Guitar, which can be seen performing at Shockoe Bottom’s C’est le Vin and at Boogaloos in Brookland Park. During his podcast he often chats with locals who are making a positive impact in the community. He also writes poetry and short stories as ideas come to him.
One such idea was sparked last year during a bike ride around the city, during which he stopped at sites including the Robert E. Lee monument, the Richmond Slavery Reconciliation Statue and Lumpkin’s Slave Jail site. Realizing Richmond still has a long way to go in acknowledging its historic role in slavery, he wrote the poem, “I Have Seen Richmond,” detailing some hard truths about racial discrimination and injustice. He submitted the poem to the James River Writers/Richmond Magazine Shann Palmer Poetry Contest, and it was selected as this year’s winning poem as judged by Richmond’s first poet laureate, Roscoe Burnems.
How Jones got to where he is today was years in the making. He’s had a lifelong love of the arts dabbling in music and writing, but it was always an aside to his job as a physician. While he doesn’t regret his chosen profession, he says it was taking a toll on his mental health.
“A lot of cool stuff came out of that career, but on the other hand, emotionally it was hard, and I don’t think I really realized until after I retired that, wow, I was a pretty toxic human being for a lot of the time,” he says. “It’s a stressful gig. And made worse, I think probably in the last 15 years, by the health care system.” He cites the pressures by hospital administrators for doctors to see more patients in addition to demands of scheduling more procedures and taking more on-call shifts as reasons he had become jaded about his career.
“I don’t consider myself a retired physician,” he says. “I didn’t retire from being a physician — I retired from health care.”
Jones with some of his musical instruments
A near-death experience also forced him to take a hard look at how he wanted to spend his days. Jones is a bike enthusiast and a former competitive cyclist. One day in 2010, while he was living in Chicago, he was struck by a vehicle making a left turn in front of him. He was launched onto the car’s windshield before falling into the street.
“I remember lying there on the side of the road, and I was really afraid that I was dying,” he recalls. “I could tell I was going into shock; I could feel it getting cold.” His injuries included broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a crushed left leg. “I just remember thinking, ‘I just want to see my kid,’ ” Jones says, his voice breaking. He spent a month in the hospital undergoing a shoulder replacement and several surgeries. The incident served as a reminder of how life can change in an instant.
After a second cycling accident in 2011 involving a vehicle on a rain-soaked Chicago street, he decided to retire from competitive bike racing. As Jones had sustained more broken ribs and another collapsed lung (this time on the other side), his orthopedic physician advised caution. “He finally said, ‘There’s no wiggle room anymore,’ ” Jones recalls. “ ‘You can’t break anything else because this stuff can’t be fixed anymore.’ ”
Jones relocated to Richmond that same year, taking a position as a professor of medicine at MCV (now VCU Health). He already knew he loved the city, having earned his medical degree from VCU in 1986, and it was a convenient location to be closer to family. He remained at VCU Health for a little over a year before opening a private practice.
Previously divorced, Jones remarried in October 2019, and he and his wife, Debbie, share a mutual passion for cycling; they met while competing. During their honeymoon, as the couple watched the sunset from a rooftop deck in Portugal, Jones says he had a moment of clarity where he realized he couldn’t remember the last time he had been so relaxed. He says that’s when Debbie told him, “This is why you’ve worked so hard,” essentially giving him permission to lay off the gas pedal. A year later, he retired.
Jones says he is happy with his new bohemian life in Church Hill and recommends that others find their passion. “Go ahead and write a story, go ahead and write a poem, go ahead and write a song, go dance,” he says. “It’s like people are afraid that they’re going to be judged or they’re going to be told that they’re stupid or that they’re no good, and those kinds of measurements, those metrics, they don’t have a place for that; and we live in a society that emphasizes success rather than quality of life,” Jones says, adding, “I feel so fortunate to be able to do this. … My life feels so much better to me now.”
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