I had a routine physical yesterday and I pretty much zipped through it, which is likely because it wasn’t assessing my overall health but rather my healthy-enoughness. Back in college I signed up for the National Marrow Donor Program, not because anybody in my family was sick, but because another student on campus made a general appeal to the entire student body on behalf of one of his relatives. I was already in the habit of donating plasma every time a blood drive rolled through campus, and I cracked all the obligatory jokes about being that much cheaper of a drunk when I was down a pint, but on a deeper level I think I realized that I was living a life of utter and complete leisure and luxury while my parents paid for my school bills and I made exactly zero contribution to society, so sacrificing something that my body could easily spare and replace seemed like the right kind of token to keep my karma from devaluing too precipitously.
Anyway, you sign up for the NMDP and they keep you on file forever, and if at any time you should come up in the computer search as a match for someone who needs a marrow donation, they will track you down. So it generally goes like this: a computer search flags you as a potential match, and they call you to see if you’d still be willing to donate, and if you say yes they order blood tests to determine if you really are a full match, and if you are then they give you a physical to make sure you are healthy enough to go through the donation process, and if you pass that they set up the actual donation. Alert readers may remember a month or so ago when I was talking about various medical lab appointments – that was the full-match testing, which I didn’t get into in too much detail back then because it could have been a false alarm. But, as of now, it looks like this is going to happen.
So yeah, if I had been having a real physical with my real GP (which reminds me I need to find a new GP now that I’ve moved, and I also haven’t had a regular check-up in about 3 or 4 years) then I might have been advised that I am carrying a significant amount of extra weight around the old waistline and probably should watch what I eat more closely and exercise more and so on. But as far as my suitability for lying in a recliner for five hours while my blood circulates through an apheresis machine? In the clear. And it was yet another opportunity to reflect on the fact that I am, all in all, pretty lucky to be in some absurdly high percentile of healthiness. I have naturally low blood pressure. I’ve never been diagnosed with a serious disease. I’ve never had surgery of any kind other than oral (which the doctor yesterday literally waved off with “that’s nothing”). My tonsils and appendix are intact. Never broken a bone. Never been hospitalized. Not on any medication, nor am I allergic to any medication (that I know of, as I always hasten to add in those medical interviews, because how would I know?). I don’t have any chronic pains or conditions. When I find time to sleep, I sleep just fine. I have some environmental allergies but that’s more of an inconvenience than a health problem. I am losing neither hair nor eyesight (and yes I’m young but I have friends my age who are mid-loss themselves). Aside from being as out-of-shape as you would rightly assume for someone whose job description includes “computer programming” and hobbies include “reading and watching tv”, I’m fundamentally hale and hearty. If this sounds like I’m bragging, then consider it instead permission for you, if you ever hear me in person complaining about being plagued by ill-health, to punch me in the face.
At any rate it’s just as well that I am rarely in need of medical attention because man oh MAN do I hate doctor’s offices. My physical yesterday had three parts, a general exam, an EKG, and a chest x-ray. The first two were quick and painless but when I got to the radiology department I had to sit there in the waiting room for a long time. And of course most people who are waiting for a radiology appointment are not perfectly healthy specimens getting cleared for donations. Obviously I’m not upset with other people for having accidents or getting sick, and I’m grateful that modern medical treatment is available to them (or those who can afford it, at least) so this is not an angry rant. It’s just an expression of melancholy.
If I spend more than fifteen minutes in a medical waiting room, I start to feel like I can sense which people (like me) consider their own visits there to be exceptional deviations from the norm, and which ones are regulars who take doctor’s visits as the norm. And this is going to sound blisteringly obvious but I have a much easier time reckoning with the concept that “everyone gets sick sometimes” than I do with “some people are sick most if not all the time”. And that latter idea is even harder to grapple with when you consider that a good chunk of those sick-more-often-than-not people are old, living their so-called golden years but not necessarily enjoying them. Evidence of which was on hand yesterday in radiology.
There was a married couple in the waiting room, I noticed, and at first I thought it was very sweet that since they were both retired, they could both go to the doctor together even though it was only the wife who needed the appointment. That is sweet and I don’t mean to take away from that completely, but I couldn’t help but notice that they seemed to have a lot of trouble communicating with each other. Partly this was because the wife was very hard of hearing, but the husband managed to create some confusion on his own. He was flipping through a magazine and saw a story about that movie Ondine that just came out, and he tried to show it to his wife and say “Hey, there’s that Colin Farrell guy you like.” The wife was mystified, and they went through a bit of who’s-on-first until finally the wife explained to her husband that she enjoys the cinematic work of Colin Firth and has no idea who this Colin Farrell is. I’m not saying that I think this clearly indicates the husband has early stages Alzheimer’s, or even that he’s tragically disengaged from his wife, because at the end of the day however vast the gulf between Bullseye and Mr. Darcy may seem to me, I know that it’s pretty trivial. But still. My wife and I love to sit around and just talk to each other, and we both love movies and tv and talking about same, and the thought of time slowly wearing us down to the point where either of us can’t hear too well or can’t keep actors straight, there’s a sadness in that.
And again, that’s still a minor sadness. Another patient in the waiting room was an elderly woman, pushing 90 if she was a day, who was attended by a professional nurse. Dementia was also in attendance. The nurse was clearly the employee of the nursing home where the elderly woman lives, and the nurse was fairly patient despite her charge being quite a handful. Handful is a word we tend to use to describe the little guy in our house, and I’m using it deliberately here, because the elderly woman reminded me of nothing so much as a toddler. Maybe a three year old, because she was capable of forming complete sentences with perfectly pronounced words (albeit in a girlishly high register), but she also tended to repeat the same things over and over. And over. And over. If I had skipped this intro and told you I had heard this conversation:
-“I want to go to the bathroom.”
- “You just went.”
- “But I want to go.”
- “No.”
- “I’ll be right back.”
- “I said no.”
- “But I want to.”
- “You just went.”
- “I’ll be right back.”
- “I said no!”
You would think I was quoting a mom and a three year old, right? How about if I threw in this exchange:
- “Ow, don’t pinch me!”
- “But I had to you won’t listen to me!”
But I swear, this was all nurse/90-year-old interaction, word for word. And it just cut me to the bone. I haven’t even figured out what kind of response to dementia makes sense. Do you feel sorry for the person? Does the person who would understand you feeling sorry for them even exist anymore? Is dementia the worst possible thing that can happen to a person, or is it really not so bad because you lack the capacity to notice what’s become of you? My mind boggles. And I can encounter someone with dementia and think to myself “Ai yi yi I do not want to end up like that” but so what? Living well beyond the age when our ancestors would have been too slow to avoid being eaten by sabretooth tigers has engendered the consequence that some of us outlive our own mental capacities and no one seems to know exactly why or how to fix it or even stave it off. And all I can do, therefore, is just try not to think about it, because if I do think about it I find it to be painfully incomprehensible. Which brings us back to my point: I am unspeakably grateful that I enjoy good health and do not have to spend much time surrounded by reminders of all the ways I can and will decline.
But that’s a bummer of a thought to end on so let’s go even further back. PONIES!!!
PONIES PONIES PONIES PONIES I love PONIES
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