After EMS: License to Chill

Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a series from Mike Rubin. In this series, he’ll reflect on his career and share practical retirement advice for emergency medical personnel.

In my wallet are two licenses less useful than an AARP card.

The one from the FAA states I’m qualified to exercise the privileges of private pilot. It’s an impressive-looking credential that lacks an expiration date. How curious. I last flew left seat when George Bush was president—the first George Bush. Then I got glaucoma.

The other ticket says Michael Greg Rubin, Paramedic-Retired, is a duly licensed paramedic. Does that make me the first ambulance driver to use up retirement before sick time?

Nah, it’s just a Tennessee-style accommodation for the recently retired. Without EMS certification for the first time in 32 years, I’m supposed to chill on the porch, smell the peonies, and leave working people alone. I have less say in emergencies than a nanny. I could go to jail for giving oxygen.

Retirement tasks me with such indignities. I’ve become more a patient than a provider. My tactical gear is pillows, slippers, glasses, vitamins, and eyedrops. I keep my cane close but my medicine closer.

It’s still hard to believe I went from 60-is-the-new-50 to Palookaville in just five years. I wish I’d known that was possible, but when I was growing up, people were more preoccupied with "Red China" than retirement. We weren’t sure we’d reach 65.

Mid-20th-century media dubbed retirement “the golden years,” a theoretically blissful state financed by downsizing and pensions. They also said cigarettes were sexy. Neither worked for me. I aged all at once, or so it seems. Even my wife, The Lovely Helen, says I’m not as young as I used to be.

Those elderly patients who make responders feel lucky to be younger—they are me. You’ll wheel all of us away eventually. When it’s my turn, I’ll still be wishing I were you.

I miss EMS. I want to come back. Give me late nights stoked by quick carbs, and I’ll faithfully confront angulated fractures, bad smells, Patient Zero, and even 100-year floods. (I have plenty of practice dodging floating sharps.)

Seriously, bring it on—the long hours, the low pay, the heat, the cold, the big bodies, the digital overload, the crooked hallways, the frantic families, the gunk, the germs, the refreshers, the protective pets. Those are inconveniences, not dealbreakers. I want to be tested. I need to be useful. I should be making bigger decisions than Do you want fries with that? I’m old, but I remember more than I’ve forgotten, and I can still spot sickness from the doorway.

I’d even take my 2007 wage to re-up. Okay, maybe I’d need more than 13 bucks an hour, but as my Brooklyn-born brother-in-law would say, “that ain’t happenin’.” The sooner I accept my inactive status, the less obnoxious I’ll be around people who still do what I used to.

I’m sorry about the griping. No one, not even a complainer, likes a complainer. I’ll stop. I had an awesome career as a medic: 28 years that fit me much better than the other 44. I loved the challenges, the responsibilities. Best of all, I don’t think I left any patients worse than I found them. I sleep the sleep of the right-patient-right-drug crowd.

So why am I here? I’ve been invited to share practical retirement advice in this space, including these lessons I wish I’d learned sooner:

• What hidden consequences of aging do we share?
• How do our finances change along the way?
• Which senior skills are particularly useful?
• Why are the above important?

There’s much more to discuss, and it doesn’t all have to come from me. If you have plans for retirement or you’re just curious about the process, tune in next time, and we’ll see what develops. Maybe you’ll want to forward a few lessons of your own.

Or we could go flying.

For Alison, who would have retired by now.

Mike Rubin is a retired paramedic and the author of Life Support, a collection of EMS stories. Contact Mike at mgr22@prodigy.net.