On Aging

Jesus, I complain a lot, right?

I know. I'm not going to even try to make excuses. Sometimes, I'm just a glass half empty kind of gal.

Take this whole aging thing. I've ranted on about it several times before and I know you are wondering why I would bring it up yet again and the truth is, I just cannot wrap my brain around the fact that the woman staring back at me from the mirror is...well...ME. When did I get that old? I recently had my passport renewed and my photo was reminiscent of a Cold War era, female Soviet gulag prisoner. All that was missing was the babushka.

There is nothing that really prepares you for the slow decay of your body. For me it seems that one minute, I was being carded for beer and the next, the clerk was calling me ma'am and asking me if I needed help carrying my purchases to the car. Sadder still is that I often accept because I'm tired, dammit!

There was a time when I was codger bait. Older men LOVED me. Now, I'm the coug. The other day, I was having a conversation with a much younger friend and she happened to mention that her mum was forty eight years old.

Forty eight.

Four years older than me.

I am always surprised by how young women are when they start having their babies in this part of the country. Before the age of twenty five, I couldn't keep a cactus alive let alone a child.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love being in my forties. For the first time in my life, I can walk by the romance section at the bookstore and not sneer. I've got a great family, a bit of cash and I'm self-employed. Generally, life is very, very good. What I don't like is the downward slide of just about everything else.

Finding a bra that is not a Playtex fortress nightmare is impossible. I am forever adjusting the straps and pulling down the back in an effort to hoist the mams up and frankly, I'm losing the battle. The girls are exhausted. They want to lay down.

Those surround mirrors that you find in dressing rooms are a fucking blight on society. If I wanted to look at my arse, I would have been born Jessica Biel. Enough said.

And then, there are the wrinkles, the furrows and the grooves that assemble themselves into a physical depiction of the years that I have lived, like the rings in a tree stump. Who cares if my dimples and crow's feet are deeply etched? Who cares if my eyes are sinking into my head? I do. Shamefully. Vainly. Botox-lovingly. Do.

The most jarring thing about aging is the morning you wake up and come to the slow realization that there are likely fewer days ahead of you than behind you. That's the light bulb moment upon which I still spend time. It has changed the way I process information and make decisions about everything but most especially, it has sharpened my relationship criteria. Simply put, I try to limit my exposure to toxic individuals. The truth is that some people, (and this includes family), are just not emotionally well enough to hold front row tickets in my life. I have found that if I let them, they can suck the soul out of my existence.

I often wonder what the view will look like from ten or thirty years from now. I'm curious as to how my priorities will shift and evolve. I am in no hurry to get there but I can't help but think that there will be a time when I will look back upon my forties and reminisce about how young and stupid I was back then.

Light, Camera, COLON!

Colonoscopy.

As I mentioned before, the preparation part of it is the worst. Spending an entire day fasting and necessarily within a toe's length of a privy, was about as fun as listening to a crying baby. At first, it's tolerable and you think, "I can do this". Then, it progresses to something like, "Are you kidding me? Is this really still happening?" Finally you succumb, defeated, exhausted and begging someone to kill you dead.

I woke up the day of the procedure lighter on the scale (whee) but with a dehydration headache. I didn't want to drink anything because I'd had already had to take eight more pills within half an hour of waking and the water from that dose exited nearly as quickly as it had entered. My arse was on fire. No joke. A word to the wise here: Get thyself to the nearest warehouse club and purchase a case of baby wipes and drum of vaseline. Use them, from the beginning and for every trip. Forget the Charmin, which will come to feel like the NY Times. Words like chafed, raw and tender will take on new and intimate meaning. Just hearing a toilet flush will cause you to wince.

I am so not kidding.

The procedure itself was quiet and uneventful. I asked the doctor what he was injecting into my I.V. when it was showtime.

"Fentanyl and Midazolam," he replied. I love my doctor. The rest is a bit hazy.

Approximately twenty minutes and three removed polyps later, it was all over. It wasn't that bad and getting confirmation that there were no signs of dysplasia anywhere near that delicate spot was welcome news.

With a few days of perspective, I have to admit that while somewhat unpleasant, a colonoscopy is really not that big a deal. For me, the peace of mind easily supercedes the pain in the ass (deliberate reference) quality of the whole thing. Besides, it was nice to be shit-free for a day.

I say we make it a mandatory procedure for our elected officials.

Preparation

"Osmoprep" are the pills that they gave me this time since I am unable to choke down that wretched liquid gunk.

They are turning out to be Satan in a bottle. I've had to swallow four pills with eight ounces of water every fifteen minutes since 2:50pm. My gastro doc had a cancellation for the morning so I got a call to get started on the preparation part a couple of hours early.

Fifteen minutes is much shorter than you might imagine.

I have learned that I am a good sprinter.

Oh. My. God.

Poop Chute Blues

Nothing hearkens middle age in Western civilization like the onset of health issues and those invasive, uncomfortable tests that come with them. Most of my peers are getting their first taste of crappy blood reports full of "pre-diabetic" warnings, high cholesterol numbers and liver panels that do not bode well for the future. Sure, we join the gym and try to "watch what we eat" but the truth is that sort of just accept, as a society, the inevitability of nursing a growing collection of pharmaceuticals as the years tick on.

Except for my mum, that is.

She is the other extreme, drinking green smoothies full of spinach and foul spirulina, reading everything she can get her hands on about food, health and how everything is interconnected. In spite of how I tease her, I have to admit that there is something to be said for her lifestyle. When you line my mother up in a roomful of people within a decade on either side of her age, she looks so much younger than everyone else. She radiates health. She eschews all but one medication. She has never had a mammogram because she believes the brain is susceptible to suggestion and doesn't want to plant that particular seed of possibility in her head. She is fearless.

I will admit that there have been plenty of times in my life that I thought perhaps her Birkenstocks were strapped too tightly but now, as the sins of my twenties have come back to haunt me, I think that she's on to something. The one concept she has always stressed is that the medical community is full of human beings who by virtue of being human, can be expected to err. "Ultimately, YOU are responsible for your health", she says.

I've toyed with that concept for several years researching diets, implementing new exercise programs and eliminating certain foods from my kitchen. Some efforts were more successful than others and some things were just all kinds of stupid. I dabbled because generally, it's more enjoyable to remain blissfully ignorant. Until there is a medical scare and there always will be one, right? Because how we treat our bodies today determine how big our pill case of tomorrow will be. No brainer.

I turned forty and overnight, it seemed that my entire physiology changed. As I ushered in my middle age crisis with Harley Davidsons, wrinkles, presbyopia and ill fitting bras, I began to get serious about my health. I have accepted middle age, embraced it. I am having the time of my life. I'm also having a colonoscopy this Thursday.

(Let's just pause there a second. I need to catch my breath.)

And I'm kind of hoping that after taking a small biopsy of my stomach, my gastro doctor is going to tell me that gluten is not my problem. I can absolutely live and live well without gluten or any other grains but I'd like to give them up on my own terms. There is a whole new class of people who are proving to be "gluten sensitive". My doctor thinks I'm one of them.

Whatever.

All I know is that until a few months ago, I ate all the wheat, barley and rye that I wanted, like I had been doing for forty four years. Becoming gluten free was a choice and admittedly, I felt freaking GREAT without it in my diet but I didn't HAVE to avoid it. Now, it appears like I do and I can't help but sort of kick myself because it seems like I have manifested this issue just by virtue of letting it hit my radar.

I am not going to wail on about how crappy the colonoscopy is going to be (pun totally intended) because really, the procedure itself is the nicest part about the whole ordeal. Instead, I'm going to focus on the fact that after it is all said and done, I will be able to state, unequivocally, that I am no longer full of shit.

That will be a first.

Free

Now that the dust has settled, I can share a bit of what my life has looked like over the past month.

First of all, I left my job which was a huge deal for me. I had been thinking about it for a long time and for a number of reasons but fear of financial destitution kept me firmly in place. It wasn't a bad gig as far as working for a company goes but over the last three years, I found myself dreading Mondays more often than not. Since the bulk of time in any given week is spent trying to earn a living, I figured that I owed it to myself and to my family to try to make it on my own.

So, I formed a company with one of my closest friends.

It's been both terrifying and thrilling. I'm pretty good at what I do which has enabled my clients to make the transition without so much as a hiccup. Those close relationships have also meant that I've heard what my former employer has had to say, most of which is ugly and unpleasant. It doesn't upset me because frankly, it was entirely expected but it reflects poorly on him and that makes me sad.

Second, we watched our eldest son, Dallas's boy, head off to boot camp and let me tell you, THAT was hard. I am a raging liberal. The idea of one of my children in the services was something unfathomable to me until I realized that without the military, the chances of eldest learning a trade, being able to support himself and having access to things like health care and favourable mortgage rates, were next to none. Eldest was one of the many kids who slip through the high school system like ghosts and who graduate without a meaningful plan for the future.

Like a lot of his peers, eldest left school with the ability to play video games, an acceptance of mediocrity and just about nothing else. Thank God for the navy. They will pick up where we failed him. I'm very grateful.

Third, teenage daughter recently experienced a bump in the road but rather than tuck her head in the sand, she has stunned us all by taking the steps necessary to move to the next level in her life. I feel hopeful for the first time in nearly two years. We've extended an invitation to her to come and live with us for the remaining six months that we have in this country. I know that there are some of you shaking your head in disbelief right now but when your kids will allow you to help them help themselves, it is a gift. I am officially holding my breath.

Fourth, I am homeschooling Dylan and loving it. Liv will finish third grade in the public school but she will be coming home too, at least for a year. My head is aflame, I know.

Finally, I've given up gluten. I'm not a celiac but after heaps of research, I've come to the personal conclusion that our bodies were not mean to consume most grains. For nearly a month, Dallas, the kids and I went Paleo (no grains, dairy or legumes). I felt better, lost weight and the nagging ache in my right arse cheek went away. Then last week, we went to Florida and everything went to hell on Saturday night. We had a fabulous meal at Emeril's and I ate the bread. I ate the flash fried oysters. I had CAKE for dessert. It was gastronomical nirvana.

And then for the next three days, I blew up like a balloon. I looked like something that belonged in a Johnny Depp movie. My toes, cankles and knees were so swollen that I looked pregnant. I had wicked cramps, made unpleasant trips to the potty and Sunday night, the sciatic pain in my ass came back. Let me reiterate: I am not a celiac but sadly, my days as a grain eater are over. From now on, I will try to stick to a mostly Paleo diet. Surprisingly, gluten free beer is pretty good and apparently, Whole Foods stocks some gluten free flour so date scones are in back in play. I think we'll manage. If you are interested in checking out the basics, mosey on over to this Paleo website. He also wrote a great book. It might not be your thing but it could cure what ails you. I should probably mention that my most excellent cousin, Rosie, turned me on to this; she of great wit and unflagging research skills.

Okay, so that's it for now. I'm off to China next month, which I said I'd never do again, but now that my name is on the letterhead....

Never say never, right?