07/21/2026
Every profession has a moment when the mentor who taught you is no longer standing beside you.
In surgery, one of my mentors called it the Green Tile Moment—the point during a difficult surgery when you instinctively look up, almost expecting your mentor to tell you what to do. Instead, there’s only the green tile on the operating room wall.
Eventually, every surgeon reaches that moment.
The remarkable thing is that great teachers are still there. You hear their voice. You remember their judgment. You approach the problem the way they taught you to approach it.
As we approach the anniversary of my father’s passing, I’ve been thinking about those moments. My father, Dr. Randall E. McNally, taught me many things, but the lessons that matter most were never really about surgery per se. They were about judgment, humility, listening, and always putting the patient first.
I wrote a personal reflection about those lessons and the extraordinary legacy he left—not only for me, but for generations of physicians he trained. As I reflect on my father’s legacy, I’m also grateful for the mentors who shaped my own career.
My father was my first teacher, but my fellowship at Rush University Medical Center and my training at UChicago Medicine introduced me to extraordinary surgeons whose wisdom has guided me through many of my own Green Tile moments. Today, I’m privileged to carry those lessons forward with my colleagues at Midwest Sports Medicine & Orthopaedic Surgical Specialists, Ltd and Alexian Brothers Medical Center Inc.
By Thomas A. McNally, MDAs the anniversary of my father’s death approaches, I have been thinking about him as both a father and a surgeon. Those two parts of his life were never entirely separate, at least not for me. My surgical education began long before medical school, residency or fellowship,...
