General Surgeon Glaser Announces Retirement

By Scott Hagerman, Messenger-Inquirer 

Chris Glaser knew he wanted to be a doctor from an early age. 

But it wasn’t until his third year of medical school, when he was doing 12 weeks of internal medicine at the VA hospital in Louisville, that he fully realized he was much more interested in curing people than simply treating their ailments. 

He had taken an interest in an older gentleman who was a hospital patient battling a tumor in his colon. Glaser said the man was “always sick, slowly dying.” When he was unable to find the man one day, he learned from the chief resident that the man had started bleeding and had been taken to surgery. Expecting to see the man in poor condition, Glaser was shocked at what he found. 

“I found him on the surgical ward sitting up reading a newspaper, his (dinner) tray empty, and I never saw him out of bed,” Glaser recalled. “He was better. He was cured. It occurred to me that people that come to see a surgeon with a surgical problem, most of the time you can cure their problem — you take out their hot appendix, you take out their bad gallbladder, you oversow their bleeding ulcer, you take out their colon cancer. 

“I never saw (a cure) happen one time with internal medicine, so I kind of immediately knew. At the end of the day, I want to be able to feel like the patient’s better than they were when they met me.” 

From then on, Glaser, a Louisville native and a graduate of the University of Louisville School of Medicine, knew he was set on becoming a general surgeon. He just didn’t know he would soon be arriving in Owensboro.

“Beginning my fifth year in residency, I sent a letter to every general surgeon in Jefferson County, looking for jobs, and I had three or four offers in Louisville, everybody was looking for somebody,” he said. “But the University of Louisville Alumni Association has a service where they fax off your (curriculum vitae) to all of these medical staff offices, and Bill Hayden walked through the doctor’s lounge and saw my CV on the bulletin board and pulled it off and called me. 

“In big cities, general surgeons don’t do much. But when I came down here to look at the job, I realized you actually got to practice general surgery.” 

Glaser, who is retiring Dec. 31, joined what was then Ohio Valley Surgical Specialists — known today as Owensboro Health Surgical Specialists — in 1993, which became part of the Owensboro Health Medical Group in 2013. 

“Back in those days you didn’t make quick (career) stops; it took me four or five years to build up a practice,” Glaser said. 

“The last thing I wanted to do was leave and start over again. Nowadays, 90% of physicians are hospital employed and you can jump from one job to another, and people do it. 

“They’re in a place for one year, then they move to another place, then some other place, and I never had any intention of doing that. I wouldn’t recommend anybody do that now.

“Half of the joy of this job is establishing yourself and seeing patients over and over again, and people from their family coming to see you. I was at the pool one day and some mom said, ‘You recognize this guy?’

He was about 16 years old. I said, ‘No,’ but he had a little scar, and I had operated on him when he was 10 days old. Sixteen years later, there he is. I can never think of a time when I thought I might leave (Owensboro).” 

Glaser is a former chief of surgery at Owensboro Health Regional Hospital, formerly Owensboro Medical Health System. 

While he’s performed about 26,000 colonoscopies and 4,000 to 5,000 gallbladder surgeries during that time, it’s the work he has done with patients with breast cancer that he’s most known for locally. 

“My training program was pretty heavy in the treatment of breast cancer,” said Glaser, who found a mentor in Dr. Michael Scherm. “Mike Scherm was kind of the breast guy, everybody wanted to see Dr. Scherm. 

I think through watching him and the way he talked to his patients and the way he approached it, I realized there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.”

Glaser wanted to learn the most effective and least invasive techniques possible, recalling that “my grandmother had breast cancer and they did a mastectomy on her, and it didn’t heal (correctly), and she had this God-awful wound.” 

Without a plastic surgeon in Owensboro at the time, Glaser traveled to Dallas for several years to learn oncoplastic surgery techniques. 

“I was looking for a course where I could learn how to do breast reconstructions,” said Glaser, whose time in Dallas led to Owensboro Health being one of four facilities to pioneer the use of the BioZorb Tissue Marker, which at the time was a cutting-edge implantable surgical device that allowed more precise administration of therapy in women being treated for breast cancer. 

Glaser narrowed his focus to treating breast cancer as the years went on, with it having been his sole focus the past two years. He said he always tries to put patients at ease. 

“The good news is most people with cancer survive their cancer,” he said. “The first thing I try to do is help them relax. I walk in, and here are three things I’m going to tell you: it’s unlikely you’re going to die of breast cancer, you sure don’t need a mastectomy to treat this, and then I try to say I don’t think you’re going to need chemotherapy, because I think those are the three things women fear the most, because they see themselves lying in a casket with no hair and no breasts.” 

Glaser said the cure rate for breast cancer is almost 98%. In addition to so much money and attention having been directed at breast cancer, he said advances in mammography has made it very easy to detect at the earliest stages. 

“Because we have such effective screening, if a woman does what she’s supposed to do, she gets her mammogram every year, if something shows up and she takes care of it right away, it’s extremely rare to find a bad breast cancer in those women,” Glaser said. “Almost always it’s a tiny little thing and you can take it out. She may or may not need chemotherapy, may or may not need radiation.” 

As Glaser wraps up his career through this month, he said he never viewed being a surgeon as a job. 

“I think if you’re going to do this right, it has to be a vocation,” he said. “I don’t think of this as a job. You need to dedicate yourself to it like it’s a vocation. I really think there is a right way to do it, and you have to be passionate about it in order to do it right. I think most general surgeons are passionate about their work. 

“You have to do this for the satisfaction that you get from helping people feel better.” 

Glaser said he has no specific plans for his retirement. He and his wife, Jennifer, enjoy playing pickleball, going on hikes and bicycling. They also have four grandchildren to spend time with. 

“I will miss working; I really love what I do,” he said. “There just comes a time, and my old buddy that retired years ago said you’ll know when. I used to kind of smirk at my older partners when they would talk about how sore they were, how tired they were, how worn out they were. But I was 30 years younger. Now that I’m almost 66. I get home from a big day, and I limp into the house. You don’t recognize it until you get a little older, and it does take a toll on you.

“But I’ve got plenty of things to do. Every minute of my life for the last 37 years has been planned out. I want to sort of freestyle it for a while.”