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D. About Disability Retirement
Unlike Service Retirement, which is a planned retirement, Disability Retirement is usually unplanned, which makes it even more stressful than a Service Retirement. While we can’t eliminate all the stress that comes with an unplanned retirement, this section is designed to help reduce some of the stress, especially the stress that comes from not understanding the process and/or not knowing your options.
As fire fighters, we grapple with risk every day, but we tend to focus on the immediate risks of the job, particularly incident-related physical injuries. But as we all know, there are other long-term risks that we also face, including injuries and illnesses that develop over time, including exposure-related illnesses. We are all also becoming more aware of the long-term risks to our mental and emotional health. Like the physical wear and tear that builds up over time and one day suddenly becomes unbearable, the impacts of our work on our mental and emotional health can also creep up on us and suddenly become a crisis.
We are raising these issues because we all need to broaden our thinking about our health. We need to move beyond just focusing on our physical health and become better at assessing the health and well-being of our full selves: our physical, emotional, and mental selves. Concerns about the health of any one of these three aspects of our whole selves is a reason to seek medical care and may lead to an eventual disability retirement. While a disability retirement is always an unwelcome event, our goal is to ensure that you’re covered, regardless of the nature of the injury or illness that’s the cause of your unplanned retirement.