Month: September 2021

It is strange how the normal daily routine of life can make a sudden ninety degree turn into the surreal.  That’s how my life has felt the last four weeks surrounding a surgical procedure and the pre-surgical and post surgical restrictions that took almost every one of my favorite activities away from me, for a season.

The casualties were food, drink, running, tennis, fishing, hiking, pickleball, volunteering and travel. The restrictions were pretty simple.  Take it easy, don’t lift over seven pounds and subsist on a mostly liquid diet without any carbonated beverages.  That doesn’t sound bad, I know, but it actually targeted my life in a very insidious and  Machiavellian manner.  

First, I don’t like coffee but I do like caffeine. So in my normal life I have a Diet Mountain Dew every morning.  It gets me that wake up energy with no calories in a form I enjoy, but that’s been disallowed.   I’m a carnivore by nature and meat, nope, not on the menu, nor were fresh veggies.  And every day of the week I’m either playing tennis, pickleball, running, fishing or volunteering.  Sometimes all of those on the same day.  But all of those involve some pretty substantial bouncing around or lifting and therefore, also verboten.  

You might ask “Surely volunteering isn’t on the don’t fly list?”.  And it isn’t per se, but I was only comfortable in loose baggy ultra casual stuff, you know, the work from home wardrobe.  That’s not really appropriate in a college or foundation board room.  Neither was sitting for hours in uncomfortable conference room chairs hashing out organizational governance issues when you are feeling a good bit of physical pain.  And the travel required to get to meeting locations was also unpleasant enough that I just took a pass on everything I could not Zoom in to.  And that left me feeling disconnected from an important part of my life.

I did come up with some work arounds.  I bought a new fly rod, couldn’t find my old one.  And I’ve been a few times to a friend’s pond to catch small panfish.  That stays well below my lifting limit and those little tykes are easy to catch and release.  I also went in slouch clothes to watch my friends play pickle ball, and that was more entertaining than staying home.  Food, well, that was just very boring until the restrictions started to ease up.  And I did get to Zoom into some of the volunteer meetings, just not very many of them. 

And that brings me to this week, I’m halfway through the six week recovery period and life just got a whole lot better.  I was cleared to play pickleball and eat anything I want!  I have to use some self control not to go crazy on the court but since pickle ball is a lower impact sport compared to tennis, I can do that.  And yesterday I brought home a pizza!  It was like a slice of heaven, I had it again for breakfast this morning.  Nothing makes food taste so good as having done without any variety for awhile.  

And I also put on business casual clothes this week for the first time in over a month and drove 5 hours to my former university to mentor five engineering students.  Stayed overnight in a hotel and drove home the next day for three more hours of local college committee and board meetings.  It was a pretty grueling reintroduction to my volunteer life.  But I did fine! It was nice having that face to face social contact again and I really believe in mentoring and in my local college’s mission.  I got all that done without any assistance as my wife is at the beach with one of her old college buddies all this week. 

Today I have to prepare some testimony for my lingering consulting work I can’t quite seem to escape.  But, maybe because it plays to my ego to get paid for being an “expert” I’m even looking forward to that.  Plus it is a favor to my former associates to provide them a local expert.  That saves them the expensive travel costs to bring in a hired gun from the other side of the country.  It is a very simple case and we are taking a noncontroversial position so it should be light duty.  

I think when my wife returns I’ll even cajole her into doing the heavy work of getting our boat from our garage to an area lake and see if we can catch some bass.  And I’ll start hitting tennis balls again next week, not playing singles but just practicing.   That’s pretty light work and I miss being on the court.  All in all,  life is good and it is getting better every day!  I appreciate the positive thoughts and wishes so many readers have expressed in the comments.  Having friends like you means a lot and it is also very powerful medicine.  

What about you?  Have circumstances ever occurred in your life that made a sudden and drastic temporary change in your lifestyle?  How did you handle that?

If you had to give up some of your favorite things for a period of time, did you notice how amazing it was to get them back?  I’m simply in awe of how good pizza tastes!

What is it like to be fully retired?  I think most of the people in the personal finance community can not answer that question because they are still working.  They may be self employed or at a nine to five but they are in the phase of life where their focus is on accumulating the nest egg of investments and passive income they plan to use to fund their lives at some point in the future. As one of the smaller group of us who are actively retired, I’d like to share what full retirement looks like to me.

I became mostly retired when I left my nine to five career five years ago.  I became officially fully retired a few months ago when I stopped my part time hobby job of consulting.   So for the first time in my life my wife and I have no source of income other than our investments and a $300 a month teacher pension my wife receives.  We will not start receiving Social Security for another five years. But for now we are living primarily off our investments.   And how does that feel when you’ve been an earner, a saver and an investor your whole life?   It feels pretty weird.  

When I was actively consulting during the first five years of my retirement I never marketed my services,  I just waited for work to find me.  I did not really think through the fact that just because I decided to stop working, that did not mean work would not continue to come looking for me.  And so it has.  One of my old consulting co-workers called me today and asked if I would do him a favor and testify as an expert witness at an upcoming regulatory proceeding.  It is easy work since his clients aren’t opposing anything in the hearing, so I suspect the parties to the docket will let me slide through cross examination without trying to make me look like an unqualified idiot.   He is in kind of a bind so while I will get paid something for my time I’m not doing it for the money, just for a couple of  friends.  Also because it will force me to study up on the topic, which is good exercise for my brain.

But those are not the only reasons, I have to confess earning the consulting fee I’ll get does give me a little dopamine hit and a sense of satisfaction.  I spent a career becoming an expert on a few obscure topics and getting paid for it sort of closes a circle inside of me, or at least that is how it feels.   So that is one thing I think most retirees will find, particularly the younger ones.   Work will come looking for you, and you will probably agree to do some of it, even if you don’t need the money.  There is just something in the human brain that associates paid work with a feeling of purpose or accomplishment.

While I think work that pays offers more of a reward than unpaid volunteer work, they both do check the “having a purpose” box in your brain.  One of my goals when I stopped consulting was to find a way to mentor to add to the other volunteer work I was doing.  I wasn’t specific about who or in what area but I felt like older people like me who were successful at something could offer some useful life tips to younger people.  When I look back on my life I feel like I was successful in being a dad and husband, financially and in my career.  And coincidentally my university engineering department kicked off a new mentoring program right after I stopped consulting.  This first meeting with our student mentees is coming up in a week and my team of mentors is already meeting to get ready.  It won’t pay a thing, not even expenses, but I think it will be fun and might help a new generation avoid some of the potholes we seasoned engineers learned about the hard way.  

The same week I also have board meetings of the community college trustee board of which I am the chairman.  Prior to the board meeting we also have at least two committee meetings of board subcommittees so there will be several hours of work, not including the preparatory work, to be ready to preside over the meeting.  It can get a little dry, but the mission of the college is something I believe in.  Our students include a lot of nontraditional students, students who only speak English as a second language, first generation college attendees and people living below the poverty line.  I have seen first hand students transform themselves from being poor to becoming millionaires.  That’s not typical but I believe almost every student we serve sees an improvement in their lives.  Education, whether they are studying history or welding, makes a difference.  So while it does not pay anything it scores pretty high on the purpose scale. 

And because, when it rains it pours, my foundation board meets that week too.  I also chair that board  and there will be committee meetings in addition to the board meeting so a few more hours of work will get squeezed into the next few days.  This foundation runs a low income medical clinic, a fitness center that provides scholarships to low income clients and both home hospice and hospice house care for terminally ill patients.  We do a half dozen other things as well but those are the main three areas we serve.  I do not need to explain how good it feels to know you are relieving pain and bringing health to sick people who do not have anywhere else to turn.  It feels amazing to get to serve there as a non-paid volunteer. 

So that is what being retired is like for me.  Perhaps some paid work popping up from time to time but definitely volunteer work in areas I care about.  Plus being on the hunt for opportunities to volunteer a little more.  I spend a lot of time on just plain fun hobbies too, which include running, tennis, pickleball, hiking, off roading, bush whacking, travel and fishing. And while I love all of those (except running) they are not enough in themselves. 

As an aside, my commitments are going to require 14 hours of driving, a couple of nights in hotels and wearing a suit and nice business casual clothes.  Considering I’ve worn nothing but shorts and tee shirts since my surgery and have a few very sensitive surgical incisions this will be a pretty interesting adventure. I will also have to carry my restricted diet food with me and am not allowed to lift more than eight pounds. I’m still trying to figure out how to get my carry on luggage to my room without doing that? My wife would normally volunteer to handle all that for me while I recuperate but she’s headed to the beach that week with her old college pal so I’m on my own. 

What about you, do you volunteer now or do you think you will after you retire? 

Would you accept part time work even if the money didn’t impact your lifestyle? 

Is it crazy to take on these commitments when I’m supposed to be taking it easy and healing up?

Six days ago I had surgery to move some internal organs around and to repair the muscles that  keep them where they are supposed to reside. No, this will never happen to you unless you are one of the lucky 2 in 100,000 people in the world, like me.  It was neither minor surgery nor was it so major that there was a large chance of failure.  And fortunately it seems to have been successful.  I had two goals, one was to fix the problem because it had around a 25% chance of killing me if left unresolved and the second was to possibly free up space for my heart and lungs to perform as designed, giving me a little more stamina on my morning runs and afternoon tennis matches.  

The first goal was achieved, everything is where it should be now, yay me!  The second will be weeks or months in finding out because I’m not allowed to do any extreme physical activity for at least five more weeks.  My diet is restricted to liquids and soft foods but wine is OK again and fish and its infinitely better than the pre-surgery week of clear liquids only! 

By way of warning the rest of this post is going to describe my experiences in perhaps more detail than anyone wants to know, but it is my blog, so be forewarned.  

I have had this condition for eight years or longer and had put off trying to get it fixed because the medical journal articles I had read indicated a fairly high death rate and a high dissatisfaction rate among the patients who had the surgery.  That turned out to be a very smart move on my part.  Over those eight years a very few talented surgeons developed a way to do the procedure laparoscopically instead of cutting patients wide open and that makes a huge difference in terms of recovery time and in terms of reducing the probability of the main thing that kills surgical patients, infections.  

The week before was basically planned starvation.  In order to move my stomach back where it belonged my other organs that had enjoyed occupying the extra space had to make way for a new roommate.   One way to do that is to shrink them.  By eating almost no calories, especially no sugar or carbohydrates my glycogen levels dropped like a rock.  And apparently, according to my surgeon, that shrinks the size of your liver, making it easier to move out of the way.  And you would think drinking broth and eating sugarless jello for a week is no big deal.  To me it felt like a big deal and also like the longest week of my life because at the end of it, wasn’t relief, but fear and uncertainty.  

I went to Denver to get this done and that’s a two day car drive from Arkansas.  The reason was that this is an extremely rare type of a fairly common surgery, so there are not many surgeons who have done it and a precious few who do dozens of them a year.  I had spent some time researching the procedure over the last eight years and there was nobody in Arkansas who had enough experience in my opinion.  In fact, my GI doc here told me it was impossible to do laparoscopic surgery in a case like mine.  I knew otherwise and the fact that a non-expert like me knew more about it than my specialist told me I needed to find someone truly special,  and I did.

 We used to call the super specialized and qualified welders that we would bring in to weld exotic alloys in our chemical complex “brain surgeon” welders because they were so elite in their skill sets.  Well, my surgeon, was a “brain surgeon” surgeon when it came to my problems.  They were routine to him.  And if you have to get anything done medically that is more than simple, do yourself a favor and find a “brain surgeon” doctor to do it. Its as simple as spending some time on the internet.

As the morning of surgery approached I got over my nervousness and just focused on the potential benefits I was going to reap, especially the one about avoiding a 25% chance of sudden death.  I was very calm right up until they rolled me into the operating room.  I’ve had colonoscopies and endoscopies and knee surgery in the past so I was familiar with OR’s, or so I thought I was until my gurney rolled into this one.  This room was surreal, even the lights over the table looked like something out of a science fiction film, like a cross between giant sunflowers and LED’s.  And the eight or nine robotic arms hanging over me were pretty intimidating as well.  Plus there had to be a dozen wide screen computer monitors surrounding me, I felt like I was in the Best Buy TV section.  It was so bright and I think I counted at least eight people on the surgical team.  The thought that kept coming at me was that this must be what its like to be abducted by aliens and probed!

Fortunately that’s all I remember until getting to recovery.  Its not unusual for people to have a partial lung collapse in surgery, at least my CRNA daughter in law says so, and that may have happened to me.  I was stuck in phase one step down for the next eight hours because my blood O2 which has to stay above 90% for a patient to be released, wandered around in the 70’s and 80’s and stubbornly refused to return to normal unless I was fed oxygen.  Eventually they sent me home with some oxygen to get me through the night.  I hung around Denver in the hotel for two days and weaned myself off the O2 after the first day.  And then we came home.  I stopped taking the opioids after the first day even though I had more of the pills.  Tylenol and Ibuprofen were more than enough. 

I started on my new diet, which is pretty much anything soft or liquid, much better than the pre-op and all my internal systems seemed fine.  My O2 levels stayed good, I bought an oximeter thingee at Target that you put on your finger to self monitor.  

I’m walking a mile in one stretch each day outside and doing a lot of internal laps in the house every hour I’m awake.  I have to eat a bite of food every hour to exercise the area that was worked on, but who doesn’t like snacks?  And that’s about all I can think of to say about that.  

I was very pleased by the information given me leading up to surgery, by the hospital’s care and by the surgical team.  I was less pleased with the post-op information we were given, they didn’t expect me to need oxygen and did not help us much in figuring out how to arrange for it or to return the equipment.  They totally changed the post-op diet for the better, which was good, but we had to call the surgeon’s office team several times to figure out the details.  Its not exactly like they dumped us once they had done all the work they were getting paid for, but it felt kind of like that.  I’m guessing as a Medicare patient they saw me as a liability, because Medicare reimbursement rates are not as good as private insurance.  But that’s OK, they did the surgery, and he made some changes on the fly based on what he saw when he got inside me, that put me in a special prized class of patients who have way better than average outcomes.   

So, I’m extremely happy for how things went.  I’m very glad I did the research and got a true expert instead of some generalist who was going to do the best he could with limited experience and knowledge. On a scale of one to ten that’s worth a million. The post surgery kerfuffles were maybe a two, so they don’t matter at all in comparison.  

My takeaways?  In today’s world you can still get world class medical care even if you are on Medicare.  I worry that won’t continue to be the case, but so far you still can.  

It pays to research your condition and who you go to for care.  You can take your car to any mechanic and they’ll say they can fix it, but if you’ve got a Lambo do you really want a shade tree mechanic working on the supercharger?   To me my body is my Lambo, enough said.  

The medical team that took care of me before, during and immediately after surgery were angels, each and every one.   They were compassionate and selfless and so kind.  And I’m nobody special, they did not know me, yet they made me feel like I was important to them.  God bless them, and how in the world can they be so nice when they face an environment of scared and hurting people every day?

Oh, and if anyone ever offers me a another bowl of chicken broth, I’m sorry but I’m going to scream. 

What about you, have you had a health experience that affected your view of the medical community?

Have you ever researched your way into much better care than just staying with a local provider?  

Are you toying with elective surgery, and if so how do you weigh the risks and benefits?  

As usual click on the title of the post if you don’t see a comments box

Three hours of gnarly surgery and eight hours of post op and I’m back in my hotel and doing pretty well! I appreciate all the expressions of concern from this wonderful community!

Thanks to everyone who checked in to offer good wishes, prayers and encouragement!