Ok - going to take a quick mental break from the fascinating world of comorbidities (which are not as awful as they sound) to respond to here.
Regarding the danger level of STBX's job- I want to be clear that I worried plenty about all kinds of things, just not that he would be killed on the job. And as long as I felt he would come home at the end of his shift, I could sleep. He began his policing career in the small Iowa town we lived in that had a force of 10. Sort of Mayberry, but like most Midwestern Mayberrys these days - it had a significant meth problem. During the 5 years there - the worst that happened was that one of the officers had to go on medical leave for carpal tunnel syndrome. so that probably fed into my sense of security. The county that he works in now is rural - and according to him, pretty boring because they won't let him "do anything".
I did worry a lot however about the toll the shift work seemed to take on his health. During that stretch in Iowa he would work graveyard one month and then switch to swing the next. Awful. I told him many times I could never do that in a million years. I have a picture of him the day he graduated from the police academy holding the then infant D6, and one taken three years later holding D3 at the same age. He looks at least 10 years older- maybe closer to 15.
I worried about his mental health too. I am going to give STBX full and well deserved props here. He volunteered to be trained to do the very difficult work of catching child pornographers. Only a handful of people will do this very, very critical and very, very disturbing work. Of course, this had to cause him issues, but he wouldn't or couldn't talk about it and wouldn't see any kind of counselor either. The academy gave me a book when he graduated about how to be supportive and I did my best to follow its advice (which was to be patient and understanding about his moodiness). I don't even know how much of this work he actually ended up doing- given his understandable reticence on the topic.
I'll check in later about the topics of respect and adrenaline. Gotta let those percolate for a bit.
