In this week’s episode, I want to discuss Navigating the Emotional Roller Coaster of My Wife's Heart Surgery. I will keep this short but I want you to understand the strategies I am using to reduce risk and more importantly keep my sanity.
For new listeners, my wife and I have lived in Ajijic Mexico which is in the State of Jalisco only a short distance south of Guadalajara, the 2nd largest city in Mexico and the home of a number of the country’s best medical schools.
Health care here on the private side is mostly frictionless. Access to the private healthcare system is easy and affordable. The same cannot be said about the public healthcare system and I will put a link in the show notes when I discussed the public healthcare system in a previous episode.
To see a specialist, you usually can schedule an appointment in less than 2 weeks and often much faster than that. Recently, I went to schedule my annual skin check with my dermatologist, and I was able to secure an appointment for the next day. My doctor was not rushed and spent well over 30 minutes with me. Past appointments have lasted up to an hour. The cost was about $60 US. That was not a copay but the total cost.
I am far more likely to see my doctors and in between appointments I can call or text them via WhatsApp. If I have a question I will text them and usually I will get a response in a few hours directly from the doctor.
My wife has real relationships with all of her doctors, which includes a hematologist, endocrinologist, dermatologist, gastroenterologist, and now a cardiologist. My wife being a retired RN is a total pain in the butt patient and she loves her doctors here.
That sets the stage for this story.
This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and be sure to pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition.
In this episode, I speak with Mike McNatt, a test and compliance engineer who continues to work contract jobs well into his 70s. He was introduced to me as the guy who has got this gig work down and that is not working for Uber. This is a rebroadcast of one of the best episodes of 2022.
You may be asking why I am doing a rebroadcast at this time. As my long-time listeners know I live in Ajijic Mexico just south of Guadalajara. My wife and I have some major decisions to make in the coming weeks. My wife needs to have what I hope will be non-invasive heart surgery. I will be putting my focus on whether my wife has the surgery performed in Mexico where we have no insurance but dealing with healthcare is much easier or do we return to the US where we are covered by Medicare but we will have to deal with the US healthcare system.
Just to be clear, my wife feels fine and has not been told to reduce her level of activity. This came as a complete surprise, and we feel blessed to be dealing with healthcare here in Mexico. Making the appropriate appointments with world-class medical specialists can be done in days and not weeks or months.
That is where my focus will be in the coming weeks and not producing content for this podcast.
Back to the introduction of the episode.
My good friend, Marti Konstant, who is a workplace futurist and career coach, said I needed to have Mike on this podcast. Mike has worked contract engineering jobs and has developed a strategy to stay fully employed.
Mike is an engineer who was interviewed for Forbes called, Working In Tech At Any Age–This Engineer Tells You How. He also produced multiple LinkedIn posts on his strategies which I will include in the show notes.
Back in the 1980s, when I worked for IBM, I helped lead a mechanical design support group. Our internal customers hired a lot of contract engineers for 12-to-24-month contracts. What I learned was they would work a contract, then take a few months off and then find the next. They were completely comfortable with this lifestyle.
Here we are 30-40 years later, and this is a new way of working. Mike has become comfortable with this, and I want you to listen to his story.
This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and be sure to pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition.
Description:
In this episode, I am speaking with my buddy Thom Singer. I have known Thom for 15 or more years. I met with Thom when I was in Austin in May 2023, and he told me that he had recorded a TEDx talk called I Did That. One of the key points in his TEDx talk is it is alright to ask for help especially as it relates to mental health issues. This discussion about mental health is one of the most consequential discussions I have had on this podcast. Please listen to all of it.
When I was in Austin in May of 2023, I had a coffee or beer with 10 individuals and 6 of them discussed some form of mental health issues that they were having or someone close to them was having.
One of those was Thom. Thom’s speaking business completely collapsed during the pandemic. I had Thom on the podcast during that time to track what he was doing to recover. The last time I had Thom on the podcast was in episode #255 in January of 2022 called Learning How to Adapt and Get Scrappy with Your Career with Thom Singer.
Thom did a lot of different stuff to keep his career going. It took its toll on him in so many ways.
What I want you to get from this episode is there are a lot of people out there suffering from various forms of mental health issues. It might be someone you care about or it might be you. It is okay to ask for help.
I have sought out help at various times in my life with my own mental health issues and Thom did the same.
This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition.
Description:
In this episode I am speaking with Kevin Kelly who is the author of Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly began to write down for his young adult children some things he had learned about life that he wished he had known earlier. To his surprise, Kelly had more to say than he thought and kept adding to the advice over the years, compiling a life’s wisdom into these pages.
When I read this book, I was smiling the entire time.
Here is the short version of Kevin’s incredible biography:
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years.
His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living.
He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acts as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is the founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years.
From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.
Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future.
This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition.
This is a rebroadcast episode that is publishing during the July 4th holiday of 2023. In this episode I am speaking with Fawn Germer, who is the author of Coming Back: How to Win the Job You Want When You've Lost the Job You Need. I have used a lot of concepts from Fawn’s book. My favorite is being relevant is more important than your experience.
This podcast was originally published in March of 2021.
Please read her official Bio:
“Fawn Germer is the irreverent, beloved best-selling author of nine books including the Oprah book, Hard Won Wisdom. She has been a keynote speaker for more than 80 Fortune 500 companies and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times for her work as an investigative reporter. Fawn’s first book was rejected by every major publisher in the United States, but Fawn would not give up until it was the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller that Oprah loved.
Her newest book, Coming Back was released by St. Martin’s Press in January 2021. The book shows how to turbocharge your career by changing the way you change. Fawn is an inspiring storyteller and life adventurer. She’s learned plenty the hard way and is as authentic as they come. She interviewed hundreds of the most accomplished leaders of our times, including famous CEOs, prime ministers, presidents, Nobel Peace Prize winners, scientists, Academy Award winners, and many other trailblazers who revealed that success is born in risk, and power comes from consciously disabling your doubt and self-esteem issues.”
This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition.