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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...:)