There is only one way to describe the transitions I’ve made in my personal life: meteoric. I changed my life’s focus, my job, and my location. You may wonder how that’s going. So far, it’s going pretty darn well.
I always planned to stop my full-time work as a horse vet when I got “too old.” I’d intended to ease out of it and either into a part-time job, or just do ponies, or maybe consult and do relief (locum) work during the transition. My dad was a horse vet, and he left practice around sixty-five years of age. He had health issues and still really wanted to work more, and did do some part-time work until his death almost twenty years later. Personally, I think he failed at retirement.
Not me… I’ve gone cold turkey. Here’s the shocker. I don’t miss it. Who the hell invaded my body and turned off the vet-work-addiction-gene I inherited from my father and probably his father as well? Dunno, but it happened.
On December 18th, one day short of my seventieth birthday, I turned off my phone and left the building. Okay, if the truth be told, I still had one precious patient at the clinic that stayed with me for a month afterward, but essentially, I was done. Slam bam—thank you for your service, ma’am.
Regrets, I have a few,
but for the most part.
YAHOO!
(A little poetic license, which will be quickly confiscated.)
