This may be TMI, but this month marked my third colonoscopy, a thing that I will be doing regularly for the remainder of my life. It is a hideous annoyance. I am supposed to get one every 5 years, but I generally push it to 7. The indignity of it all -- from the preparation to the procedure itself -- is humbling at best. I'm going to put my next one off until I'm 70.
At the risk of turning into one of those old folks who does nothing but complain about maladies, I have also managed to get another old guy condition -- a detached bit of solidified vitreous in my eye -- basically a permanent eye floater. I'm used to it now, it's my new, always reliable, best friend.
I also have a very mild case of arthritis in my right foot. Very mild, but it's still arthritis.
All of these things are about being old, and I hate them. In the scope of life they are very minor. Symbolically they are awful. And I have no doubt there will be more to come.
An interesting aspect to modern life is that if anything goes wrong with your health, you expect it to be fixed. This wasn't the case, say, 150 years ago. Back then, if you got sick, there were weird potions and things that were little better than witch doctor spells. For the most part any malady just ran its course, if you died you died and if you lived you lived with whatever the consequences were. Modern medicine is such that for the majority of illnesses you experience, the expectation is there is a drug or surgery or something that will fix it.
So when things happen that can't be fixed or are never going to get better, it's doubly frustrating. I was horribly nearsighted and Lasik fixed that. Thirty years ago my gall bladder went south and it was a small matter to remove it (a century ago I would have died at 33). I am inoculated and immunized against any number of diseases. The list goes on. As such, my thought pattern is, "Just laser the floater out of my eye, give me in injection to relieve the arthritis, and how about a pill to prevent colon cancer, etc.,..." then things would be back to normal. As I think more deeply, this is really a plea for immortality. If they could fix everything that degrades or goes bad, I'd never die, right?
Sadly, they can't and so I get old and things fail. One day that failure is not going to be just an annoyance. That's the troubling part, every one of these little things that goes bad and will never get better is a reminder that there is a big thing like that coming.
I wish they would hurry up with my replacement Android body.
