My mother lived to be over 100, my father dead of a heart
attack at 58. I am balanced somewhere between the two, 14 years older than my
father (which brought strange feelings when I went zooming by his last
benchmark), and I am more than twice that many in years from my mother right
now. She was three decades older than her youngest son when she died a couple
of years ago on Christmas Night.
I can use facts and now something new called “alternative
facts” to list why the three of us made it to the ages we did. My father drank
too much and smoked all his life, having one of his Kent cigarettes to calm his
nerves while walking into the emergency room where he would die a couple of
hours later. By the same mixology of real facts, until a couple of years ago, I
was following my father’s footsteps and drinking too much and smoking a pack a
day.
My mother had an amazing life free from major illnesses. Oh,
there was the time at the family camp on the Amite River when my father was
rebuilding the rotten back steps, warning her they would be gone, and she
stepped out the back door anyway and broke her arm after crashing to the
ground. The flu, colds, her teeth pulled early in life. Older, during Jen’s
illness, my mother had arrhythmia and a pacemaker was installed after shocking
her old tumbling heart back into normal rhythm. Late in life she took a handful
of pills morning and evening: one for her heart, one for blood pressure, others
for memory and blood-thinning and to keep her bathroom visits regular while
clumping down the hall and grunt-sighing. But all those pills and infirmities,
spread out over the course of her long years, a century of them, revealed a
graph heavier at the end, sure, but plenty of white space for all the good health
during the years of putting up with my father and raising three sons.
Despite all my drugs and drink and nicotine and unprotected
sex (in the early days), knock on wood, I have followed more at this point
along my mother’s trail that I must have blundered along while ignoring any
signposts. A tonsillectomy and a few broken bones early on, I have battled the
more serious RA and diverticulosis since I was 33 years old, the latter finally
catching up with me in a big way. So cruising along, ignoring the healthier
route usually, I had my first scary detour two years ago. Mild discomfort for a
day and a half and I drove myself to the hospital (not recommended by the
experts) and in thirty minutes I was being wheeled down the corridor to the
cath lab. The hands of nurses pulling at my shirt, I emerged sometime later
with three stents in an artery that had a 99% blockage. Waking after an
emergency or suddenly being free of long aggravating pain is like being a goose
in the morning in a new world, everything fresh and the clear absence of what
came before. I was glad I had more time.
Seven months ago a backdoor check of the plumbing revealed a
6” stricture in my colon, a crisis,
scary, the abdomen pain and discomfort during the previous decades blooming
into emergency surgery and again emerging, glad to be alive, thanking young Dr.
Cook for saving my life. Now all vanity forever gone, hanging for only moments
from a colostomy bag, the first abhorrent thoughts of carrying a bag of shit
around at times. It was a worse nightmare coming true. But eventually I traded
the dropping away of the horror for being able to watch my granddaughters
continuing to discover their world.
Five months in and looking forward to reversal surgery and
the pain was back, scary again, enough so even after dealing with severe daily
arthritic pain for 40 years, I had to walk the floor during the night. Blockage
in the colon again? The pain radiating from stomach to bowels perhaps
diverticulitis, or the pain now higher in the chest perhaps the old
once-blackened heart sending broken signals from a life made hard? A week in
the hospital having chest x-rays and CT scans and blood work and sonograms and
urine-checking and eating what passed for a liquid diet: bad Jello, watery
grape juice, rancid coffee. Another test, a MCRP (Magnetic Resonance
Cholangiopancreatography), and I had a “nasty, diseased gall bladder.” Unsure
until the surgery began, it was touchy but the surgeon was able to operate
laparoscopically. So only a few more puncture scars joined the foot long scar
from the colostomy that insures a t-shirt on the beach to avoid stares at a
never ever very firm six-pack.
So here I am, recovering still, from both operations, my
daily walk now limited to the end of the driveway, the reversal surgery for the
colostomy delayed for now, but the idea (like my mother) that my more severe
health tumbles are coming on this far end, and I am still here to enjoy family
and friends. And after a long year of nothing, just reading, reading, reading,
whether only okay or otherwise, these finger taps left on cyber paper are the
first impressions left outside of myself in too long a time, with more to come,
I hope, the spark of being driven to open a hardening vein over the keyboard never
quite dimming out.
No profound lessons here, folks, you are free to move along
to the next post. These musings at age 72 are the same as experienced by
millions: old age is a tough journey with a payoff kick in the ass like no
other. But one of the good things is that most of the useless shit continues
dropping away and you are left with more appreciation for the good times, the
times the granddaughters do “sleepovers” here like my two daughters did at my
mother’s house when growing up. Old age and you do learn the old circle is unbroken, and you learn the circle
certainly does grow ever smaller every day.
