You're Old, I'm Old . . . Get Used to It!

by Virginia Ironside

  But because people of sixty need two-thirds more light to read by than they did when they were twenty, the real problem is the dark. Have you noticed how dark your bedroom and living room have become recently? It’s not because the bulbs have got dimmer, it’s because you just can’t see as well as you used to. Most old people hate driving in the dark. And as for going to see shows in museums—forget it. With the obsession for preserving the colors of fabrics and watercolors, most of us over sixty, when we’re visiting an exhibition of fashion or paintings, need not only the big print catalog but also a powerful flashlight.

  Apart from macular degeneration and cataracts, which may well come to us all, the most irritating thing about getting old is the presence of those wretched little black ants that sail across your vision—floaters. These are the common cold of the eye, in that no one can do anything about them (well, they can, but the operation is dangerous). My reading gets faster and faster over the years as I try desperately to read ahead of the floater waiting, a millisecond behind my reading, to obliterate the page.

  Cancer

  So many of my friends have cancer, or have survived cancer, or have friends and relatives dying of cancer that, while I used to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat saying to myself, “Help, I think I’ve got cancer!” now I wake in the night in a cold sweat saying to myself, “Oh no, I haven’t got cancer! There must be something wrong with me!”

  Doctors

  The big dilemma about doctors, when you get older, is which kind to choose—young or old. The old ones have more experience, so you’re in safer hands. But the young ones have more up-to-date knowledge. Whatever the answer is, we’re now at an age when we actually do know our own bodies pretty well—probably better than most doctors of any age. After all, we’ve lived with our bodies for over sixty years. We know the difference between cystitis and something more threatening. We don’t panic any more when we get the flu. And if some youngster of a medic dares suggest that the agonizing pain we feel in our knee is psychosomatic, we do have the sense to suggest that the doctor refer us for an X ray, just in case it’s not.

  Sometimes I wish I weren’t too old to train as a doctor because, like most old people, I know quite a lot about various kinds of medicine, having experienced a variety of illnesses over the years. Quite a few friends consult me in my self-elected role as Dr. Ironside; I’m pleased to report that I’ve already saved at least one life and, by my sophisticated diagnosing techniques, have certainly put a couple of friends on the path to symptom-free lives.

  Dozing

  Dozing is, you might say, hardly an ailment, but a physical joy that comes with old age. I’ve never dozed in my life until now. And it is the most pleasant sensation. You lie on a sofa, watching television or reading a book. And then you feel as if there were an invisible hypnotist in the room, willing you to close your eyes. You feel sleep stealing over, you feel your book flopping onto your nose, and before you know where you are you are off on a wonderful afternoon doze, probably, I’m afraid to say, with your mouth open. But what pleasure.

  If I have something important to do in the afternoon, I am wary of having any kind of lunch. In fact I only have to have a glass of orange juice and a poppadom and afterward I feel like a hero in a film who has been slipped a Mickey by an evil enemy. The room goes all wobbly, I start seeing double, and before I know it, I’m collapsed on the sofa, out for the count for a good half hour.

  Another odd thing is that when you rise from your doze to make yourself a restorative cup of tea and grab a much-needed digestive biscuit (again, something I never used to do), you get up by placing your hands on the arms of your chair and kind of hoisting yourself up while, from your lips, escapes the undignified sound “Ugh!”—a grunt every bit as powerful and involuntary as those grunting servers at Wimbledon.

  Hearing

  I went for a hearing test the other day. They’re starting to become as commonplace as eye tests. And although I can’t hear anything that anyone says to me at a noisy party, my hearing isn’t nearly as bad as I thought. Quite normal “for my age”—one of those phrases we’ll be hearing (or not hearing as the case may be) a lot more in the future.

  I am starting to judge a restaurant not primarily on the quality of its food but on the quality of its acoustics. I only really like restaurants that have carpeting on the floor—and preferably on the ceiling and walls, too—so I’m a great fan of the stained carpets and flocked wallpaper in Indian restaurants that are, sadly, being phased out to make way for white walls and tiled floors. The more cloth napkins, tablecloths, and general muffling material, the better for us hard of hearing . . . it sucks up all the sound of other diners. Otherwise I often find the whole table of oldies cocking their heads as they listen, as if they’re trying to tune in to a special radio wavelength that will make comprehension easier.

  And at last I have discovered what is meant by “my good ear.”

  Funny Turns

  A couple of my friends recently have had what can only be called “funny turns.” One was found lying by the side of her bed, briefly unconscious; the other had been cleaning windows when he was found, again briefly unconscious, having fallen off a chair. No one knew what on earth was going on, but it seems this is a pretty common condition among older people, known in medical terms as “the Drop.” Maddeningly, however many ladders I climb to change the bulbs in the overhead lights, or however many stairs I tumble down, drugged with Temazepam on my way to the loo in the middle of the night, I haven’t been able to experience one of these interesting markers. Yet.

  Runny Nose

  Where do these drips come from? I never had them when I was young. But I think I may have the answer. Do you remember a comic strip called Georgie’s Germs, when you were young? It featured a young boy, George, and little goblins were depicted inside his body, pumping his heart with bellows, punching out red spots when he had measles, adding gunpowder to special concoctions to make a sneeze. Do you think they’re all still in there, these tiny people, manufacturing nose drips for when we’re old? Waiting for awkward moments to release them? Just as you’re kissing your hostess goodnight.

  I asked someone the way when I was lost in the country the other day, and this old farmer stuck his head through the window, and on the end of his nose was a drip just waiting to fall. “You first turn to the left,” he said. . . . “Then the right . . . then round the roundabout ...” And I kept praying the thing wouldn’t launch itself into my car. Or my face. Teaming up with my own drip.

  Skin

  Lots of funny things happen to your skin when you’re old. Not only do you get freckles on your hands—mine look just like my own grandmother’s and I find it utterly unnerving looking down and seeing her hands wiggling about at the end of my wrists—but your hair gets surprisingly thin everywhere except in your nose and, sometimes, your chin. I have one weird black hair that grows from my chin like that of a witch in a fairy tale. Then your body gets covered with tiny little red lines—thread veins. Thread veins if you’re lucky. Otherwise you look down and find you are covered with great fat pulsing purple rivers—varicose veins. They haven’t hit me yet but the moment I find one I’m going to get it stripped out, pronto.

  Two fun things to do with your old skin: one is to cut off those funny little skin tags you get, with a pair of scissors—very fun. And the other is to pinch the flesh all over your upper arms so that you are covered with little bits of skinny peaks, rather like an iced Christmas cake. This is surprisingly satisfying—though not to onlookers.

  Tests

  I just love medical tests. Now that there’s not a man to pay regular attention to my body, I have to settle for lying back in a luxurious chair and savoring the pleasurable feeling of blood being drained out of my arm by a good-looking male nurse, ideally from Sri Lanka. Or indulge myself with the blissful relaxation of a bone scan, while a great machine thrums its way over my entire body. I wasn’t too keen on the heart test, which I had when I was
so frightened I was having a heart attack (yes, the usual old acid-reflux scare), but in the end it was good fun.

  “How much exercise do you get?” asked the doctor.

  “None,” I replied briskly.

  “Then how breathless do you get,” he said, coldly, unfazed, “when you run for a bus?” Using my Lady Bracknell voice, I told him in no uncertain terms that I never ran for a bus. I told him that the only way to catch a bus was to miss the one before. I usually drove everywhere, and did he know that if I went on a bus I got it free, unlike him because he was too young nah nah nah-nah-nah et cetera (see earlier).

  In an attempt to establish his superiority, he got me onto a treadmill, saying that even fit young men lasted no longer than eleven minutes.

  Don’t ask me how, but I managed to do twelve. Admittedly I had to go to bed for a week afterward, but it was worth it, just to see the look on his pink young face.

  Alternative Medicine

  Along with the topic of mugging, this is a subject of discussion that is banned from my house. I do not spend hours and hours in the kitchen slaving over pheasant à la Normande for eight people in order for it to be eaten to the accompaniment of air-headed talk about whether acupuncture works or not, or how wonderful arnica and echinacea are. I’ve read enough books on quack medicine to be completely convinced that the bad press given to alternative medicine is, by and large, entirely justified. I’m quite prepared to believe in their placebo powers, but do I really want to hear about the miraculous effect that Bach Flower Remedies had on some godchild’s asthma, or how my friend’s husband’s brother-in-law’s tennis elbow was cured with a diet of dock-leaf soup? No, I do not.

  My Personal Story

  I’m so glad you asked. I thought you’d never get around to it. Well, I have been feeling a bit old recently. It’s called “senioritis,” I think. I suppose it’s having had this wretched colon-removing operation so recently. (No, not cancer, but thank you for asking.) A much older friend of mine said, wisely, that when you get older and have a setback like a Big Operation, you do recover, like everyone else, but you can never recover completely. You fall a few ratchets when you’re ill, but when you recover you’re always one ratchet down from where you started. I know what he means. Hence the word ratchety, no doubt. Or do I mean crotchety?

  Yes, I actually sport a colostomy bag. It’s not too bad, honestly. Apparently R. J. Mitchell had one—the chap who invented the Spitfire. I always imagine his bag was rather leathery, covered with metal studs, like his flying helmet. And, oddly, Henri Matisse had one, too. Can’t imagine what his looked like. Now, many people have trouble finding something positive to say about having a colostomy bag, but it does mean you’ll never get rectal cancer. And it does give you complete control, even when you have diarrhea. And certainly when you are on a country walk and need to “go” you don’t have to scrabble around for dried-up leaves to wipe your bottom with. Every cloud, as they say . . .

  When I was writing a piece about having a colostomy bag for the editor of a magazine for the older generation, she shrieked, “A colostomy bag? How cool can you get? Have you got shoes to go with it?”

  Ailments as Excuses

  Don’t forget that ailments are great for wriggling out of things you don’t want to do. Never be specific. Just say a phrase that you could never have used when you were young: “I’m so sorry I can’t come. I’ve had a recurrence of the old trouble.”

  2. Memory

  There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man is decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not recollect where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders and say, “His memory is going.”

  —Dr. Johnson

  BARELY A DAY GOES BY without some ancient contemporary moaning to me, “Oh, my memory’s going! We’re all getting Alzheimer’s!”

  Instead of rejoicing in the wonderful changes that happen to our memories as we age, these ancient Cassandras simply bewail the fact that they can’t remember the name of a film that usually no one in their right minds can remember anyway.

  “Oh, it was that film, you know the one, with the airplane in it, British something or was it English . . . with that actor Ralph . . . his last name starts with F I think, and it’s got two words . . . oh, what’s his name? Ralph Harris? No that’s the singer. . . . It sounds like ‘the dah-dag dah-dah. ...’”

  They can blather on for hours, pulling out all the drawers in their brains, emptying them in front of me, and scrabbling through them while I stand by saying, “I couldn’t care less. I can’t remember the name of the film because it wasn’t important and frankly wasn’t worth remembering. I know the film you mean . . . just get on with your wretched story . . . !”

  When they finally give up on the name, they stop and, with a sheepish smile, say, “Ah—we’re all losing our memories . . . a Senior Moment!” (or, as a more amusing friend calls it, a CRAFT Moment—“Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing”).

  But just because I forget something it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s usually because I’ve quite simply forgotten something. Like I sometimes forgot to take my pencil case to school. To be frank, I’ve never had much of a memory anyway. I’ve never had a memory to lose. When I was fourteen I used to go into a room wondering what I’d come to get, and no doubt even at two I was probably staggering up the stairs to my bedroom and completely forgetting that it was my teddy bear I was seeking.

  If, when I was young, I forgot the date of the Battle of Hastings, I didn’t go on to my fellow pupils about how we were all losing our memories. I just said, like a normal person, “I’ve forgotten.” (Anyway, I hate being bracketed with everyone else as a doddery old fool. It’s like when people rather older than oneself—or, come to that, younger—start a sentence with the phrase “Well, at our age ...” And you feel like tweaking their nose and saying, “Excuse me, could you rephrase that?”)

  Apparently there are three stages to memory: Acquisition, Storage, and Retrieval, and as we age, the capacity to carry out the processes can vary, person to person. The one that worries most people after middle age is Retrieval. Life seems to be one long quest. “Where did I put my glasses?” “Where did I leave my bag?” “What happened to that last bit of cookie that I’m sure I didn’t finish—or did I? My awaiting taste buds and saliva tell me I didn’t.” When we scrabble around for the names of books, actors, or even our closest friends, it feels as if we are riffling through old Dickensian card files, the corners of which are grimy and rounded with age, while the young are simply leaping through their memory systems as neatly and swiftly as brand-new state-of-the-art computers.

  (These days I sometimes get so irritated by failing to remember where I put things that I think I ought to carry a small tape recorder with easily accessible buttons that, when pressed, would respond with the words, “Oh, where’s my bag?” “Where did I leave my glasses?” “Have you seen my phone?” simply to save my voice unnecessary stress. But I comfort myself with the fact that I get so much exercise running up- and downstairs hunting for them that I certainly don’t need to go to the gym.)

  But is all this memory stuff really such a big deal?

  Cathryn Jakobson Ramin—who wrote a book with the snappy title That Memory Book: How to Deal with Distractibility, Forgetfulness and Other Unnerving High Jinks of the Middle-Aged Brain—embarked on a quest to improve her memory. Eschewing the dreary old mnemonics—why should she have to imagine, whenever she went to the shops, a dog being ridden by a pig holding a bag, for example when she wanted to buy pet food, sausages, and tea?—she ventured into the medical world. She consulted neurologists and biologists, and made forays into the realms of meditation, neurofeedback, and anything else she could lay her hands on. Were her cortisol levels too high? Anxiety can cause lack of memory. Was she eating properly? Fish oil can improve memory. Had she had a head injury when young? Was it
a hormonal problem? Could it be her hippocampus? Or her thyroid? Too much alcohol? Not enough? Would playing bridge help? What about Sudoku? Did her synapses play a part?

  But in the end nothing particularly made much difference and she just had to come to terms with the situation. And make lists. And there is nothing wrong with that. I’ve been making lists since I was ten. Admittedly they’ve changed slightly from the old days when they featured items like “Feed cat,” “Do homework,” “Have bath,” “Write thank-you letter to Granny.” But they are still very useful. (I hate to admit it, but today I hadn’t written “Have bath” on the list so after I’d had it I actually wrote in the words “Have bath” and immediately, triumphantly, crossed it out.)

  I don’t want to trivialize true memory loss, of course. There is a moment when it’s worth seeking help. “Where did I leave my glasses?” is one thing, but “What are glasses?” is another. Losing your car keys is one thing; losing your ability to drive is another. Forgetting your granddaughter’s name is one thing; forgetting to pick her up from school is another.

  When a friend said to me the other day that she was losing her memory and it was worrying her so much she’d made an appointment to see the “. . . what is that person called . . . you know, the one you go to when you’re not feeling well?” I realized she really was getting quite seriously wonky as far as her memory went.