I'm Retired! Now what?

May 23, 2026

Last week my big social event was a six-month checkup with my friendly cardiologist.  These visits always tend to be a great boost to my ego because regardless how I might feel at the time, I always feel like the robust picture of health when I come bounding into to doctor’s waiting room.  I say ‘bounding’ because I am often one of the few souls in there who looks like they could be able to bound anywhere.  I also tend to be one of the few who can walk without the need of a cane, walker, or the steady arm of a professional caregiver.  Indeed, I’m one of the proud few among the cardiologist patrons who doesn’t look as though they have one foot in the grave with the other dragging behind.

 In other words, a lot of the folks I see here tend to resemble the audience I saw at the last Moody Blues concert I went to, and even though all of them are old enough to be charter members of the KISS Army back in the day, few look like they’re ready to, “Rock and roll all night and party every day!”  Then again, some of them look as though they might have caught Frank Sinatra on his first tour or perhaps even Mozart for that matter.  Judging by the crowd I nearly expected to see business cards from the local funeral home stacked up on the waiting room’s tables, which leads me to wonder if such an act would be considered in poor taste or just good business.

Although I was feeling pretty healthy, my heart did jump a bit when I caught a glimpse of one of my old electronics college teachers who was making his exit from the waiting room.  I say this because I was nearly certain that the man had been dead for years!  I suppose that was mostly fortunate for him, but I was also fortunate that little blast from the past didn’t spike my blood pressure.  In fact, all my vitals were great, and I weighed in at a fine, healthy 205 pounds!

My cardiologist is a great guy and tends to be all smiles when I see him.  I’m guessing few of his patients start up their appointments with tales of a 27-mile hike in the Grand Tetons.  Well, my follow up to that claim was that the hike was supposed to be only 9-miles, but somewhere along the way I might have gone left when I should have gone right.  I also doubt if many of his patients toss out such questions as, “Is an hour long, eight mile work out on an elliptical too much for me?”  His answer was simply, “I think you’ll be fine.”

So one might ask why I go to a cardiologist in the first place, other than humoring my extreme medical paranoia?  Well, that all started when my older brother Alan left this world a few years ago due to a heart attack.  The guy was only three years older than me, and even though we’ve shared the same 6’2” height since high school, our girth was a bit more selective.  The guy had over a hundred pounds on me, and where my job, for thirty something years, required being on my feet and moving around a lot, his life long career centered around a cushy desk job.  I’ve also been hitting the gym regularly over the years, meaning that my lifestyle was a bit more heart friendly…or so I thought. 

Not long after my bro’s passing, I had a six-month checkup with my general doctor where I mention Alan’s death.  My doctor actually knew my brother and suggested that I take a stress test just to see how my ticker was doing.  So off I went to the treadmill with a bunch of stuff hooked up to my chest, and even though I thought I was busting a cardio move like a tween at their first dance, I failed the test.  Therefore, I was referred to a cardiologist to see what the heck was up with me!  Of course, being the hypochondriac that I am, I could nearly feel my heart skipping beats and every time my arm went to sleep or I had indigestion I was convinced that I was having a heart attack.  I didn’t even want to go near butter, cheese, or any type of red meat thinking that such poison would clog up my arteries and plunge me into sudden death! 

I even considered writing my own eulogy because I was convinced that no one could write it as well as I could.  However, my only last wish to my wife was, “Make darn sure that my tombstone is bigger than my brothers’!”  Indeed, I wanted something that would make the Taj Mahal look like it belonged in a trailer park.  Something that the air traffic controllers would give warnings to airline pilots by saying, “You should be getting a visual on Eddie’s tombstone before long.”

For weeks I was convinced that my fate would fall to that dreaded story of, “He looked fine this morning, and then he just dropped dead.  It was the weirdest thing.”  The nurse that took my vitals at my first cardiologist appointment didn’t exactly start things off rosy either.  She took one look at my stress test results and whispered, “Oh my gosh.”  Such made me want to react with, “Sweetheart, you might want to work on your poker face a bit there.”  Although by that point I had fallen into a routine of giving myself CPR every hour just to be safe, my cardiologist merely smiled and suggested that we carry out an angiogram to see what kind of shape my arteries were in. 

Before the angiogram I had an ultrasound where some very attractive lady who was probably pushing forty, but still very pretty none the less, gave a little insight of what was going on inside me.  As this gosh awful sound erupted she merely told me to chill.  “That’s just your blood flowing,” she replied.  I wanted to scream out in a mad panic, “That’s what my flowing blood sounds like!?!?”  It sounded like something that should be coming from a Roto-rooter machine as it cleans out bathroom septic lines.  That alarming noise alone was enough to give me a heart attack!

The angiogram took place in a hospital where I was wheeled into an operating room while some lady said she was going to shove a needle into the artery of my wrist.  Then she told me just to be safe, they were going to prepare the more personal area below my waistline just in case they needed to use the artery that runs where my leg meets the rest of my body.  For some reason this little prep job seemed to take the entire hospital staff.  I was beginning to get the idea of what a woman feels like when she’s about to give birth.   Either that or the feeling of a porn star on a filmset.  “Yes, just bring everyone in to have a look!”

Low and behold, they managed to do what they needed to do through the artery on my wrist and all the shaving and prepping of the other place was just busy work to pass the time.  Unlike the two colonoscopies I’ve had, I was semi-conscious during this procedure, which was more the feeling I experienced at my high school graduation party back in the 1980’s.  Other than the feeling that I was at a photo shoot for some gay porn magazine, I don’t remember much about the ordeal.  However, I do remember the best part, and that’s when my cardiologists said, “There’s nothing wrong with your arteries.”  That was the good news.  The more sullen news was when the RN told me that I had best be careful with that hole they had just poked in my arm.  “That’s not a vein.  That’s an artery,” she said while wrapping up my wrist.  “Mess that up, and you can bleed to death.”

No doubt, my fear of having a heart attack will always be there, and at times I do have a few issues with my chest.  It’s nothing that a good burp won’t cure though.  So, that makes me wonder how many guys of my age think they’re having a heart attack when it’s just gas.  With that in mind, I also have to wonder how many guys simply think they’re having gas when indeed, they are having a heart attack.  Geez, that’s enough to give a fellow a heart attack.