I Know What Stress Is Now

Editor's note: Here is another first responder that Mayor Rawlings and the city of Dallas want you to believe is greedy, self-serving and overpaid.

Two years into his career as a Dallas police officer, Mike woke up in the back of an ambulance fighting paramedics after having a nocturnal seizure.

The emergency room doctor asked him if he was under a lot of stress.

Not really, Mike told the doctor who responded, “Your wife told me you just got back from out of state burying one of your partners who shot himself. She said you are working all of your extra job shifts and working on covering his also. She told me she’s pregnant with your third child and she needs some tests due to an abnormal sonogram.”

Then there was that call he had answered earlier in that evening when he drove up to a house engulfed in flames and desperately struggled to break through the burglar bars.

“Smoke was pouring from the house and I choked on it trying to gain entry because I had heard someone scream at one point from the inside of the burning house,” he said. “When I was throwing up in the yard after the firemen arrived, I didn’t know if it was from the smoke I had inhaled, the fact that they were pulling a dead family from the home or a combination of both.”

The emergency room doctor asked Mike if he even knew what stress was.

“I thought what a stupid question.,” Mike said. “I knew stress. I saw people in stress every day. People call 911 when they’re in stress.  We show up. We fix stress.”

Because of his seizures, Mike was put on limited duty in dispatch for a year a half. That assignment meant no extra jobs to help pay the bills. 

“I didn't always feel that I was treated fairly by the city,” he said, “but I believed everyone has doubts about their employer at some point in that amount of time.    I encouraged my three sons to do public service and two are firemen.  I always told them you won't get rich, but you will help people and you get a pension when you retire.”    

Within a year of his retirement, the city of Dallas and Mayor Mike Rawlings is trying to change the laws so that they can confiscate his promised pension.

“I now worry that I won't get what I was promised,” he said. “I know my job possibilities will be limited by my age and the epilepsy.    I worry more for my sons if we live in a society where they might work their whole life, plan and save, then retire, and after all that, get the deal changed.”

“I hope I didn't mislead them,” Mike said.  “One thing though: I do know what stress is now.”

#PoundOfFlesh #savethepension #backtheblue #DPFP