5 Questions With Dr. John Chabot

Over a 40-year career, this surgeon and chief has found work/life balance in the middle of his garden

Every evening, Dr. John Chabot, chief of the Division of Gastrointestinal and Endocrine Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia, takes a stroll through his backyard garden. He tends to the multitude of vegetables he grows not only to have fresh food for the dinner table, but as a way to wind down from the workday.

“It’s a ritual I have that, more than anything else, allows me to get out of work mode and into home mode, and de-stress,” says Dr. Chabot, who is also executive director of the Pancreas Center at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia. “I enjoy taking care of these living things that, in turn, also produce.”

Dr. Chabot, who has been a surgeon for more than 40 years, acknowledges that having enough time for passion projects was more difficult in the hectic, early years of his career. So we asked him for the advice he would give today to doctors about finding work/life balance, and how his favorite hobbies help him do that.

When did your love of gardening begin, and what do you currently grow in yours?

My uncles and my grandfather on my mom’s side were all pretty avid gardeners; in fact, my grandfather had a big garden that was almost the size of a full house lot in Maine. So, I’ve always had a garden when I could. Even in medical school at Dartmouth, I had a plot in a community garden with my roommates. But when I got to Columbia as a resident and was living in a fifth-floor walkup on 165th Street, it was impossible to have one.

When I got married in my fourth year of residency and moved up to Westchester County, we finally had the space for it, but it wasn’t until I got to a point in my career where I wasn’t coming home way after dark that it became easier to devote more time to gardening.

Dr. Chabot with a haul from his garden.

Today, I grow tomatoes, eggplants, jalapeño peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, asparagus, rhubarb, and Swiss chard. And I have a very hearty fig tree. These fruits and vegetables are better than anything you could get in the grocery store. I also have flowers, bushes, and trees all over the yard that I take care of, including an old oak stump that produces shiitake mushrooms all summer.

What other passions help you relieve stress and find balance?

I’m an avid fisherman. I like to big-game fish and fly fish, which I’ve done all over the world. My wife and I have a home in Cape Cod, and I like to do big-game fishing there on my boat. My goal is to catch bluefin tuna, which can range from 3 feet to 12 feet. It’s a pretty technical undertaking, and most years, I catch at least one.

My son and I also like to travel to remote places to camp and fish. We’ve been to Montana, Alaska, Iceland, Scotland, and even to Siberia. When you’re a surgeon, you’re doing high-risk procedures on people who are vulnerable and get sick easily. It’s easy to take it personally when a patient doesn’t do well, so every once in a while, it really does help to take off and go to a place like Siberia, where you can really disconnect and mentally recharge.

What advice do you have for younger doctors who want to prioritize work/life balance during hectic periods of their career?

It falls within the general advice I give to most people early in their careers: Find something you enjoy doing, then find a team where you can truly be partners to one another, because that’s crucial to your long-term success and sanity. When you work with a team of people you trust, you have faith that they can take over for you and make the right decisions — which, in turn, means you can turn off when you’re away from work. Otherwise, you’d always be checking your computer, looking over the shoulder of whoever is covering that weekend. You’re not turning off, and that’s a good recipe for burnout.

Dr. Chabot with Dr. Gulam Manji, co-director of the Pancreas Center at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia. Dr. Chabot founded the Pancreas Center almost 20 years ago.

You’ve spent your entire career at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia. What has kept you here this long?

The beauty of working in a huge organization and serving a large, diverse population means you can really concentrate on building expertise in one disease. It’s why I was able to start the Pancreas Center almost 20 years ago, to focus on treatment and research for pancreatic cancer, which is known for its high mortality rate. I think we’re on the cusp of some rapid advancements for treatments that combine chemotherapy with immunotherapy and metabolic therapies, which maybe in the next year or two, could make even more patients operable and potentially curable. We’re doing research right now on immunotherapies that recently went from a phase 1 trial, which was done exclusively here, to a multicenter phase 2 trial.

Working here also means you can find an expert for any question you have, no matter how nuanced. We have incredibly smart people across the medical spectrum, and I’ve taken advantage of their knowledge my entire career. Over the years, I’ve been able to reorganize how we deliver care to pancreatic cancer patients by having gastroenterologists, medical oncologists, and surgeons all on the same floor. So, I can literally walk down a hall with a patient and introduce them to one of the smartest people I know, and we can figure out their care together.

When you’re ready to retire, how do you envision spending that time?

Whenever I have time, I like to do projects around the house, so I may do some more house renovations. I’ve built my own rowboat before, which took about three years, so I could see myself building something from scratch like that again. And when it’s not planting and growing season, skiing keeps me active in the winter. But I haven’t thought too hard about retirement just yet because I’m not good at lounging around — I’m pretty bad at it, actually — so I imagine I’ll have to pick up more passion projects to keep myself busy.