By the time he reached his 50s, Roger Kittok had decided to leave academia behind and start over as a nurse. He gave up his stable hours, cushy job and approaching retirement. He found something more important.
Animal science professor Roger Kittok considered his career path some years ago and didn't see the meaning of it.
He took his life off autopilot, informed worried wife and longtime nurse Diann Kittok he was borrowing her parachute and leapt.
"I should have done it earlier," Roger says, four years after graduating as a registered nurse and landing stethoscope-deep in kidney dialysis.
Daughter Amanda Fink - an eight-year nurse - had supported Roger from the start, though she had questions.
"I thought he was crazy," she says: Why not keep the cushy job without night and weekend shifts, retire and then volunteer?
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And there are times at the end of emotionally draining 14-hour shifts when Roger, 61, thinks about that before reasserting the decision was 100 percent right for him.
"I'm tired, but most of the time I feel satisfied," he says.
It's not unusual for someone to have one employer at age 50 and a different one at 65.
Of 1,700 full-time workers ages 51 or 52 in 1992, 80 percent had left their initial employer by 2006, according to a 2009 study by The Urban Institute. More than a fourth of the 1,700 had changed occupations.
But most didn't change careers voluntarily, or give up financial security, or leave jobs that had taken years to obtain.
People approaching 60 - at least those who can control a job change - tend to look for an exit to the rat race, a pitstop to retirement.
Roger did it for "meaning."
The university, he says, requires professors to explain how their research will affect end users. Working in a lab, teasing mysteries from a sheep's hypothalamus, he says, "It's difficult to write that paragraph ... how that will impact the (farm) producer in two to five years."
Today, as a nurse overseeing as many as a dozen dialysis patients, some with complex medical issues, blood pressures crashing, sometimes more than one patient at a time - meaning isn't a question that comes up.
"I know I've helped these people," Roger says.
"One patient just went to hospice, and she thanked me for being there," he says. "It's gratifying."
Roger left teaching for what author Marc Freedman calls an encore career - "Encore, Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life."
Increasingly, people want or need to work beyond 65. Age 50 really is the new 40, at least in terms of time left until retirement.
Spanish speakers get reminders to start over at age 50. Cincuenta - fifty - sounds like sin cuenta - without count, blank slate.
Who at 50 doesn't at least consider reinventing, rewiring, redoing or recareering?
But starting over at 50 isn't like careering at 25.
During his encore education, Roger and Diann paid a mortgage, a child's education and helped fund two marriages.
Roger still owes $15,000 in student loans. He hopes to retire at 67.
Early in their marriage, Diann said, her quiet and reserved husband had seemed "happiest if he was locked in a lab 24/7."
Nursing was her thing.
She'd wanted it since childhood. But its demands had burned up enough of her passion she quit for eight years to take care of Amanda and son Adam.
"I thought it would be easier," she says. "It wasn't. It was just different."
Diann returned to nursing as an educator.
That's one advantage to nursing: It blooms in many soils.
Amanda likes the varied action and faces of the emergency department. Roger gets to know his patients in repeat visits every few days.
How are the grandkids? And the dog?
Adam feels at home with Alzheimer's patients while working as a licensed practical nurse in a care center.
It's possible to start the day with Adam, see Roger for dialysis and meet up with Amanda if complications develop.
"At one point when the kids were small," Diann says, "I was the only one who was not at home for holidays and different activities. Now, I'm the only one there."
Diann, who instructs seasoned nurses to become preceptors, recently looked at her family and realized, "We're actually our own support group."
Nurses need them.
A nurse graduates, Diann says, and buys a shirt that says love a nurse, gets gung ho on the floor but then gets hit by reality: "They don't know anything."
Nothing they learned in school applies. They have to learn the specifics of the department, the culture.
It's two years before they're feeling competent.
Even after four years, Roger still doesn't feel ready for every situation.
"I still go over the options," he says.
But his previous job helps when it comes to explaining the kidney.
"I taught renal function for 16 years," he says.
Roger's new role has made him more open and talkative, Amanda says.
"He's blossomed," Diann says.
Roger agrees.
"I've never regretted leaving the university to go to this new commitment," he says. "There was a path there, and I took it."
Reach Mark Andersen at 402-473-7238 or mandersen@journalstar.com.
