Age-Old Struggles
On most days, I’m more likely to smile a lot than not. I’m pretty upbeat by nature. Even so, getting older has its downsides. And while grandparents’ quirks can be kind of funny to the younger generation, they’re not all that much fun for us.
Take my mom. When my kids were a teen and middle schooler, respectively, they’d bite their lip to keep from laughing when a discreet honk or two would emanate from their Grammy’s end of the dinner table. My mom, in her full dignity, acted as though absolutely nothing had happened. The girls thought it was hilarious.
Well, I’m now 75 and personally familiar with this abundance of gas that seems to build up from time to time. With a teen living in my house full-time, I do my very best to dart to secluded room before, um, exhaling.
And then there Is this urgency, on walks of all distances, to commune not only with trees and marsh grasses but Cape Cod porta-potties that, thank goodness, dot the areas for winter and spring repairs. I usually dispense with the niceties of asking permission and just walk in.
These are just two of the little things that turn each day into something of a maze of health-related maneuvers. I spend about an hour a day stretching my back, rubbing my left foot, icing my left foot and, when that doesn’t work, popping ibuprofen for my left foot. I go to a physical therapist twice a week for both back and foot.
My vision is so poor that I was ecstatic to be able to renew my glasses without an eye exam. I’m good until age 80. When I work with students, I ask them to expand the type size to 200 percent of the original 12-point type. Meanwhile, I try not to drive after dark and do all my reading these days on a Kindle.
Every other day, before popping my six morning pills and eating breakfast, I give myself a little pin prick to draw blood, fretting when my blood sugar once again will be too high. As a late-blooming diabetic, I fear pill No. 7 is approaching when I visit my doctor at Joslin Clinic in Boston in May.
And finally, I sit with a blood pressure cuff on my left arm several times a week and try to visualize a certain Dominican beach we once visited so the image of bobbing on my back in a salty bay brings my blood pressure down to a manageable level.
Of course, I could just walk our dog Lucky around the neighborhood chanting oooooooohhhhmmmmmm. But then people might think I’m even stranger than I am. So instead, I take four more pills a day in the evening in addition to those ibuprofens and try to slow the steady decline wrought by age.
All things considered, I’d rather commune with outhouses than be visiting cardiac specialists. But I wish a few more of my montage of pills worked a bit better. And that I could meet up with mom again someplace to simply say to her, “I get it now.”
Jerry Lanson is a former editor and journalism professor. He still works part-time as a writing coach for the Harvard Kennedy School.
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