“This. Is. Just. Awesome.”
I couldn’t have said it better. We’re retired are busier than we’ve ever been — doing things we WANT to do.
Hubby is a Type A, also was in a high-stress career, and I worried that he would have trouble. It was rocky for about a month, and then he slipped right into the new life.
LOL, my wife hasn’t murdered me yet, so...that makes me happy!
I was ready. I carried a pager for 40 years, and that damn thing took a toll on me.
When I worked in Nuclear Medicine, when I got paged at 3 AM, I would have to get in my car, regardless of the weather, even if it was a blizzard, drive an hour into the hospital, be there for at least several hours, then, if I had the early shift, be back there at 6 AM...meaning not going home. Then, in IT, it was worse.
I got so sensitized to that pager, that when it went off while I was sleeping, I would levitate out of the bed about a foot, turn in mid-air, and my heart pounding wildly, would grab the pager off the night stand. I once threw my pager over a house.
It got so bad for me, my wife and I were watching television one night, and a program on the tube featured a pager going off, and that actually made me visibly twitch.
My wife saw this and said gently: “Maybe it’t time for you to think about getting another job.” Then, I went into Radiology IT, and for a long time, I was the only one on call, 24x7. It was awful, even if I did enjoy the work and its challenges.
I worked in healthcare, first ten years as a clinician, then the last 30 as an IT specialist in Radiology Informatics. I worked on average between 50-60 hours a week, and it was always stressful. I had to be “on” all the time, and I often worried that when I retired, I wouldn’t be able to turn “off”.
I had a revelation last October...my fears were unfounded.
My wife who retired about five years before I did (at my urging, because her high stress job was killing her) has become an amazing gardener, but rabbits were decimating her garden, so she asked me, after I retired last year, to see if I could find a way to keep them out of our fenced in yard.
First, I tried taking them out with a pellet gun, but that was fruitless, as it was like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket, so I found myself sitting quietly, considering how to keep them out of our yard, and I realized...
This is awesome.
Instead of having an Emergency Room physician hovering over me and yelling at me because he is unable to see the CT Brain Scan images on a stroke patient, and each second that passes has the potential to take out a hand, and arm, a whole side of a body, speech, and even life from that patient...I am trying to figure out ways to keep cute, fuzzy bunnies out of my back yard!
Yes! I can handle this kind of stress for whatever life is left to me!!!
Yep! I feel as if I have been given a second lease on life! I love it...:)