D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2012
You're Not Getting Older…
Wait — yes, yes I am. And nothing about it is "better"!
A recent survey of older folks found that the age they would most like to be again is not, surprisingly, the raucous teenage years or even the still-youthful twenties. No, apparently the age at which you have it all is your forties.
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This old cartoon shows pretty much what gout feels like when it strikes. |
Since another birthday looms next month that will carry me one more year away from my forties, this news pretty much just makes me want to eat Chili Cheese Fritos and drink "Two-Buck Chuck" merlot until my arteries clog or I pass out, whichever comes first. (Given the possibility that compounds in the red wine will counteract the artery-clogging effects of the Fritos, I'm betting on the passing out and thinking I should do this on a comfy sofa.) What point is there is trying to eat right and exercise, anyway, if it's all downhill from here?
Not that I haven't been trying. That's one of the things you notice about what the media call your "declining years." Suddenly your pants don't fit as well anymore and you start eyeing "relaxed fit" brands along with the nutrition labels on food packages. Apparently we can't eat like Paula Deen ("Slather another pound of butter on that bacon, son") and not suffer the consequences. Who knew?
When I was young, I could eat anything without packing on the pounds. Milkshakes — I remember milkshakes. For lunch at my first job, my colleagues and I would sometimes go to a restaurant-slash-ice cream parlor, where I would typically order a grilled cheese sandwich and fries, washed down by a milkshake so large it wouldn't all fit in the tall fluted glass; they gave you the rest in the metal container in which the milkshake was mixed. If I went for moderation and skipped the milkshake in favor of a soft drink (not a diet soda — I don't think I sipped a diet soda until I was 40), I might make up for those missing calories by ordering a sundae for dessert. A favorite was the "Tin Roof Sundae," which was sort of a deconstructed Snickers bar atop a mound of ice cream.
How did I not weigh 400 pounds by the time I was 30? Honestly, I was a skinny kid and stayed that way until one morning I woke up and weighed an extra 30 pounds that hadn't been there the night before. My Body Mass Index (BMI) was a "normal" 22, I can now calculate retroactively, but if I'd been at the low end of that "normal" range (18.5), I would have been too skinny for the bullies to find and beat up.
It's as if all those milkshakes, sundaes, burgers and non-diet sodas had some sort of time-release mechanism built in. They lull you into eating all this junk for a decade or two and then bam! All those accumulated calories kick in at once and you go from needing to put on a few pounds to paying attention to the Weight Watchers commercials.
As for exercise, let's face it — bo-ring. I don't understand these people who babble about an "exercise high" and how they love going to the gym or pounding the pavement until their Nikes' soles give out and their feet bleed. Have they discovered some sort of exercise that I don't know about, which doesn't involve sweating, breathing hard and mindlessly repetitive motion?
The only thing that gets me through my morning "workout" routine is Roku, a little box that attaches to the TV set near where I wheeze through my exercising. Roku connects the TV to the Internet, where thanks to Netflix streaming I can watch "Top Gear" and "Archer" instead of endless commercials and the 14th hour of the "Today Show." (The only thing that could make exercising more mind-numbing is exercising to the prattle of Kathie Lee Gifford and Hota Kotb — whose name, let's face it, looks like a nightmare set of Scrabble tiles.)
I could go for a walk, I suppose, but out here in Silver City's Extraterrestrial Zone, or whatever it's called, we don't have sidewalks. So I can take my life in my hands and pray that the guy in the white Chrysler 300 zooming to fetch the credit-card offers from his post office box doesn't knock me into the cholla. Or I can exercise at home and hope that Netflix hurries the heck up and streams season two of "Archer."
How did I get away with not exercising when I was in my milkshake years? Fair enough, no one would have mistaken me for Charles Atlas back then, but neither did my gut arrive a few minutes before the rest of me. Yet the biggest exercise I got was twirling the stool at the ice-cream parlor to the right height.
Instead of sending you an AARP card when you turn 50 (how do they know, anyway?), getting older should come with an instruction manual: "What to Do When You Start Falling Apart."
One day you start hurting in places that never hurt before. You're constantly "tweaking" your back when you bend over to pick up something heavy, like a Kleenex. You can't read fine print any more, and the feature you most talk up about your Kindle is the ability to make the type size bigger. Conversations in crowded parties or at noisy restaurants become a blur of sound instead of words, and you find yourself nodding a lot while hoping the person you're pretending to chat with isn't proposing overthrowing the government or wife swapping.
I've even started coming down with diseases I thought went out with leeches and trepanning. Back in November, I woke with a start in the middle of the night with a sharp pain, like a cramp, in my big toe. When it declined to go away, I limped to the doctor, who promptly proclaimed that I had gout. At least, he tried to reassure me, I had a condition popularly associated with famous literary figures.
Wonderful. Knowing that Samuel Johnson and Alfred Lord Tennyson also had big toes that hurt like heck makes it all better. (Apparently the Tyrannosaurus Rex named "Sue" also suffered from gout, probably from a diet too rich in apatosauruses.)
So now I've started on that road to taking daily medication, popping a pill each morning that reduces the uric acid in the bloodstream that causes gout, typically in men over 40. Soon I'll be one of those old guys who totes a small medicine chest everywhere and has to have "A.M." and "P.M." compartments to keep all the pills straight.
The gout-inspired visit to the doctor also got him looking anew at the blood tests taken before my colonoscopy (another fun aspect of getting older, as I've previously recounted in these pages), which led to tut-tutting about my cholesterol numbers. More blood tests. More watching what I eat. Still fewer Chili Cheese Fritos on the menu. Probably one of those statin pills soon to be added to the gout pill.
Then there's blood sugar to worry about. And high blood pressure. And who knows what else down the road. No wonder oldsters look back most fondly on their forties — the last years before that dreaded AARP card arrives and the trip to the pharmacy becomes the highlight of your week.
Don't get me wrong, though — I still love birthdays. Last year on my birthday I was worried about our house burning down in the Quail Ridge wildfire, so it would be tough for this year's birthday not to be cheerier. (Although not losing our house was a pretty good birthday present.)
If you're looking for what to get me, I suppose Alfred Lord Tennyson's collected poetry on gout would be appropriate. Or one of Paula Deen's Southern-fried cookbooks, so I'll know what not to eat. I could always use a pedometer, so I'll know how far I got out walking before getting sideswiped. One of those pill cases would be practical, I guess — make sure it's got room for expansion. Something to expand the big-toe room in the right shoe of all my favorite pairs might be handy, in case the gout comes back. Heck, I'll be having another colonoscopy before too long, so gift-wrap some beef bullion and Jell-O (not the red-colored kind) for noshing on during that rollicking prep period.
What I really need, though, is a time machine so I could go back and tell my younger self that those milkshakes and tin-roof sundaes will catch up with me someday.
And to savor them, really enjoy them when I do indulge. Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. So are milkshakes.
David A. Fryxell grows old along with Desert Exposure.