CHAPTER TWO - HEADING FOR THE FINISH LINE

 Sometime after January 2010 I woke up in the middle of the night very short of breath. I thought at first I was having a severe panic attack. My heart was beating wildly and thinking it was a panic attack I jumped on to my exercise bike. Exercise was one of the ways that I had beat back panic attacks for years. I would put on my running shoes and run until the feeling of panic went away. In this case the exercise seemed to make things worse. I stayed up the rest of the night and drove in to work that morning My heart was still beating extremely fast and was out of rhythm. 

 I am hard headed and should have gone to the emergency room instead of to work. Most of the morning I was as weak as a kitten but  around 11:00 AM I suddenly felt much better. It happened so quickly it was like someone flipped a switch in my body. I felt my pulse and my heart was in a normal rhythm. Thinking that this episode was some kind of a fluke I was hopeful that it would not happen again. About a month later I woke up feeling the same way. Again, I went to work hoping that it would eventually go away. Our office was upstairs and I could barely make it to our shift meeting that morning. By noon my heart was beating normally again and I felt much better. I didn't know it at the time but my heart was converting on it's own.

 One morning after retirement I was reaching over to turn off the alarm clock when I noticed that my heart was out of rhythm again. This time I told Debbie that I was going to the ER. She couldn't take me because she was babysitting. Something was definitely wrong and it wasn't anxiety. I drove myself to the ER and they whisked me right in after I told them I was having problems with my heart. The doctor wasn't pleased that I drove myself to the ER. After a few tests he came in and told me that I had Atrial Fibrillation. This is a condition that affects the upper chamber of the heart. I had some sensors there that were misfiring at times causing me to go into an irregular heart beat. 

 If you are going to have heart trouble this is probably the best one to have. My risk of stroke is higher but they put me on blood thinners to prevent that. The doctor told me that 60 was young for having this problem but with medication it could be treated. I was also placed on blood pressure medication and medication to slow down my heart. You would think after all of those years of running I wouldn't be having this problem. I had untreated high blood pressure and sleep apnea which was later confirmed by a sleep study. For years afterward I only had these episodes when I was sleeping. I believe that the things that I was eating, and how late that I was eating affected whether or not I had an episode. On average I was having about 2 or 3 episodes a year after I got on the medication.

  After retiring I knew that I would have to find a job. I had worked hard all my life and I wanted a job that was not physically demanding. Something like a security job or a courier job. I thought about working security at one of our local National Guard bases such as the Air National Guard base in Nashville or preferably the Army National Guard base in Smyrna near my house. Because I was in such a mental funk after working at Bridgestone I couldn't motivate myself to apply anywhere for about three months after I retired. From the beginning of April until mid June 2010 we lived off of the 25,000 dollar retirement bonus that I received from Bridgestone. Which was only 15,000 after the government took their part. The retirement experience has been like one long vacation for me. 

 Dynamic Security had the contracts for the military bases and I walked into their home office in Nashville one day. When I talked to the human resources officer his face brightened when I told him how much experience that I had in security and he seemed very eager to hire me. He asked me if I would like to work in a mall. From the start I thought that I was going to be posted on an entry control post somewhere and be bored to death but I was excited at the prospect of working directly with the public in a mall setting. This could be interesting. Naturally I jumped at the chance. Making it even better for me I would be working at Stones River Mall in Murfreesboro, which is only about 10 minutes from my house. Our uniforms were black pants, white shirts and a service hat. My shirts were for the most part ill fitting and I was constantly fighting to keep my shirt tail in. The hat they gave me was the old five point taxi driver style hat and I hated it. Being ex military I always tried to look sharp and I hated this uniform. I would eventually buy my own hat which was more like the military style service hats. These hats were extremely hot in the summer but they kept your head warm in the winter.

 For the first years that I worked there I averaged between 32 and 40 hours a week. After age 62 I was limited to no more than 32 hours a week, on a regular basis, because of the yearly cap on social security. I fell in love with the job from the start. There was always something happening. Primarily shoplifting but we had a variety of other issues. Fighting, armed robberies, assaults, sexual predators, drug overdoses, medical emergencies and any other situation that you can name. In July 2010, right after I started working at the mall, I had to handle an armed robbery. A young Hispanic male walked up to me and calmly said that he was just robbed at gunpoint in the food court restroom. He then pointed at two Black males walking toward the exit doors and told me that they were the ones that did it. When I spotted them they were halfway to the doors from the restroom. 

 I had just bought dinner from a restaurant called Pyramids and I turned to put my food down. The Styrofoam plate broke in half and my food spilled all over the floor. I took one step and my right knee slammed straight down into the floor as I slipped on the food. While grimacing in pain on the floor, the man who had been robbed told me to hurry up because they were getting away. I managed to stand up and run after them. As I was running I radioed my female partner to call 911. Within minutes police cruisers were everywhere. Somehow the men had gotten away. My knee did okay for about a year but I would end up having to have knee surgery.