answer:I know where you’re coming from about missing the action. Late in my career as a nurse who’d done everything, including trauma, I took a much higher paying position in cardiac research. It consisted of seeing patients in the morning and doing research documentation, meetings, etc. in the afternoon. I loved the fact that I was working for the greater good, I worked with a great team of researchers, and I found the money very helpful. But it was boring as hell. So, I worked some Fridays and Saturdays in the ER just to keep my blood up. But that wasn’t enough. Early in my career I’d taken four levels of disaster courses from the local Red Cross. These are the courses a medical person must take to get on the on-call list whenever there is a disaster. Where I lived we had hurricanes. While I was in research, I renewed those certifications. My docs were very good about giving me time off when I was called up. In the beginning, I was the medical person in evac shelters. It wasn’t exactly field expedient medicine, but it relieved the ennui of being tied to a desk. Everybody has to make their bones. Eventually I was sent to flood disasters in the Midwest which were much more demanding and closer to what I was after. I got on a list with a non-religious group out of Boston called Partners in Health, headed up by a doc whom I’d worked with earlier. They do both emergency disaster work and run long-term clinics in poverty stricken areas around the world. They gave me more disaster training. Then they sent me to Haiti for four months a few days after the earthquake in 2010. Boy, did I get my fix. When I got back to my regular job, I was definitely ready to ride a desk for awhile. Then they asked me back again when a cholera epidemic broke out the summer after the earthquake. In both instances, I worked with some of the finest people of many disciplines, including those outside of medicine, I have ever met. It was great. I was able to hold my position in research and take these amazing, short vacations into an entirely different world and do things way beyond my defined legal scope in the US, then come back and be a regular civilian again. It made the boredom of research tolerable. If you’ve kept up your EMT or paramedic certs, you might want to give PIH a call. Your skills are required.