“But those foods will kill you!” you cry. And you’re probably right. But did you ever watch the show Third Rock from the Sun? There was this great episode in which the John Lithgow character, Dick—who is a bumbling alien doing a hilariously crappy job of fitting in among his earthling peers—discovers cigarettes. Completely clueless about the fact that smoking is universally considered a vile and reprehensible habit, Dick lights up often and with abandon, chain sucking those sticks down to the barest of butts whenever the urge strikes. His Earthling girlfriend Mary (the brilliant Jane Curtin), of course, is horrified and tries desperately to get him to quit—to no avail.
“But Dick,” Mary finally says, appalled, “don’t you know that smoking takes years off of your life?”
“Yes!” Dick responds. “But it takes years off the end of your life, and those years suck anyway!”
Just something to consider.*
CHAPTER 8
At Least I’ve Got My Health, Mostly
I think I have figured out why people eventually retire, and it’s not because we become too old and infirm to get any meaningful work done anymore or because we’ve stockpiled so much cash that it’s no longer necessary to acquire even a single dollar more. No, we give up the careers we’ve spent a lifetime building because after a certain point, keeping our creaking, aching parts in reasonably working order becomes a full-time job of its own.
It’s a little bit shocking, I have to tell you. Up until fairly recently, my annual routine maintenance involved a pap smear and a lecture about the importance of the breast self-exam I was really bad about doing. I didn’t even have a regular doctor who didn’t specialize in vaginas. If I came down with strep throat or a sinus infection, I went to the closest Urgent Care and waited with all the unwashed masses seven years to see some kid in a white coat claiming to be a medical-school graduate. I vaguely recall having a full physical when I got married and made the very grown-up decision to purchase life insurance—a necessity in the sense that neither my new young husband nor I could afford our mortgage payments solo should God forbid something happen to one of us. But beyond that and the occasional teeth cleaning, I had pretty much managed to avoid having any of my orifices probed or my organs prodded on anything resembling a regular basis.
Talk about the good old days. Now it seems my calendar is forever crammed with appointments to see people I have to pay to look at me naked.
“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When I was waiting at the pharmacy for a prescription, and an old guy came up to the counter. The pharmacist asked his birthday, and it wasn’t too far from mine.
—KRYSTAL
My dermatologist Rebecca and I are on a first-name basis since my body started producing these random, benign cysts called dermatofibromas.* They’re about the size of a big pea or a small marble and usually pop up on my head—I like to joke that my brain needs more space to house all of its brilliant and witty thoughts—but I’ve had them removed from my knee and hip, too. While I’m in her exam room, Rebecca likes to put on her magnifying glasses and take her sweet time giving every microscopic inch of my flesh a thorough once-over. This is great fun and not at all humiliating, especially in a frigid, fluorescently lit doctor’s office that has a skeleton perched in the corner. (“Not wearing sunscreen can kill you,” it scolds.) Sometimes Becky takes a few nice close-up pictures of this mole or that freckle, ostensibly for the purpose of baseline comparison, but we all know she probably posts them on Facebook with funny captions, or at least includes them in her medical journal articles. Still, until now everything that’s been snipped from my body and sent to the pathology lab (this is standard operating procedure, literally) has been benign, so at least there’s that.
Then there’s the annual mammogram. I started this enjoyable ritual earlier than most, due to a family history of breast cancer.* And while I am extraordinarily grateful to live in a time and a country where this technology is available to me, every time I see my boob flattened out like a homemade tortilla between icy plates of glass and metal, my singular thought is Really? This is still the best we’ve got? Think about it. We can send monkeys (and humans!) into outer space and sport wearable computers with built-in facial recognition software. We can build a working semiautomatic firearm, an acoustic guitar, a glazed ceramic coffee cup, a waterproof bikini, a precise miniature Aston Martin replica, and even human organs with nothing more than a 3-D printer.* We can fuel cars with recycled fryer oil, track the calories we burn with every step we take, and transplant entire faces that have been ravaged by disaster or disease. We’ve built robotic lifeguards that have pulled people from riptides and saved their lives. You’d think by now we could just swallow a little computer chip that would scan our insides on the way down and transmit all of the data to our doctors’ computers in real time before we pooped the thing out. But no. Apparently, figuring out how to get Leonardo DiCaprio to Mars has kept scientists extremely busy.
I actually passed out during a mammogram once. It happened just after a perfect stranger had molested my boob, pulling it up and away from my body and smashing it against one metal plate and holding it there while she lowered another. There I was, all cranked in, when I started to feel funny.
“Is it hot in here?” I asked my molester.
“Not really,” she replied, very busy pressing buttons.
“I’m feeling a little dizzy,” I told her.
“Do you want me to get you some water?” she asked from very, very far away.
Water? What was water? My body started to break out in an allover sweat. With my one free arm, I tried to wiggle out of my hospital gown. God it was hot. I needed that thing off.
The last thing I remember was hearing my own now-infamous words:
“I’m going down.”
I woke up on the floor with my feet up on a chair surrounded by four nurses. They were white as ghosts. One was holding smelling salts underneath my nose. (In case you’ve never had the pleasure, smelling salts have a unique aroma reminiscent of burnt hair that’s been doused in ammonia. If that shit doesn’t wake you right up, you’re probably dead.) Where had all of these people come from? I wondered. And when?
“Did I faint?” I asked. I had never fainted in my life.
“You sure did,” one of them replied, still looking ashen.
“Does this happen a lot?” I wanted to know. Surely, it must.
“Nope,” another said, shaking her head. “Never. Not even once.”
I comforted myself with the thought that at least it hadn’t happened during a proctology exam.
And then there are the hot flashes. You know how they say “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”? Yeah, they were talking about your fully functioning internal thermostat, the one that told your body to produce copious amounts of sweat only when it was 115 degrees out and/or you were performing an intensely aerobic activity for extended periods of time (not when you were, say, sipping an icy lemonade and flipping through People magazine in the air-conditioned hair salon). “Is it hot in here?” you’ll ask your husband, your kids, your hairdresser, and the guy in line behind you in Starbucks, and they’ll all look at you as if you’re on crack. No, it’s not hot in there. It’s just you. (And you might want to find something to mop your upper lip with before it drips onto your shirt.)
Flattened boobs and overzealous sweat ducts aside, the thing that sidelines me the most these days are the inexplicable bodily injuries. It’s not as if I’m out training for triathlons or scaling rock faces or playing roller hockey, so the frequency and severity of these injuries almost always catches me off guard. I work out with some girlfriends, take the occasional barre or Pilates class, and try to thwack at a tennis ball for an hour or so on a quasi-regular basis. I’m in decent enough shape that you’d think I could, for instance, go bowling with my eighty-year-old in-laws without wrenching my back so severely that
I’d wind up writhing in bedridden pain for two endlessly long weeks.
You’d be wrong.
In my lifetime I have cracked a few ribs, broken my tailbone, had road rash scoured out of my mangled butt cheek with a scrub brush in the ER, suffered third-degree burns from sticking a bobby pin into an electrical outlet,* and sliced off the tip of my index finger on a mandoline,* and I can still say that throwing out your back is the worst. You really don’t know or appreciate how much you rely on your spine until you tweak it so badly that it hurts to blink and your husband has to carry you to the toilet when you have to use it. And then wipe you when you’re done. Unfortunately for both of us, whacking out my back is a semiannual occurrence for me.
The last time it happened was during a workout. I was doing a combo squat with an overhead press—using weights, of course—when something snapped. I didn’t actually hear it, but man did I feel it. I slowly lowered myself to the ground while my friends watched in horror.
“What’s wrong?” Hannah demanded.
“My . . . back . . .” I gasped. “I . . . can’t . . . move.”
“Oh my gosh, what can we do?” Lety wanted to know.
“There’s nothing you can do,” I whimpered from my yoga mat.
“Can I get you some ice?” Kim asked.
“I think that would be like putting a Band-Aid on a severed limb,” I told them. “Seriously, keep going. I’m just going to lie here. You don’t get to use me as an excuse not to finish your workout.”
“Do you want me to rub it?” Lisa asked.
“Oh God, please don’t touch me,” I begged.
They continued to offer help, but I insisted I just wanted to lie there and try not to die. After they sweated and stretched, Lisa drove me home. Later, Lety called to apologize.
“We shouldn’t have kept working out,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked. “I would have. There was nothing you could do.”
“Well, when I told my husband what had happened, he said ‘I hope you guys moved her out of the way before you finished your workout.’ When I told him that of course we did, he was like, ‘Oh my God, Lety! I was kidding! Tell me you didn’t keep working out while she was lying on the ground in pain.’ So then I felt really bad.”
“Honestly,” I told her. “If everyone had to stop working out every time I got hurt, you’d all be in really lousy shape.”
Here’s where things started to get really fun: Because I am completely intolerant of any of the good narcotic-type pain medications—they make me vomit almost immediately, which is not something you want to be doing when your spine is alternately seizing and spasming, and every breath feels like someone is driving an ice pick into it—I had to resort to over-the-counter pain pills. Aside from the hideous “Tylenol Tampering Scare” in the early ’80s, a few hundred milligrams of shit I give my kids seemed like a pretty safe, benign choice. I read the ibuprofen directions (something I only do with medication, never when I am, say, assembling a Barbie Dream House or making fettuccine Alfredo) and followed them to the letter, downing two caplets every six hours on the dot. It barely even put a dent in the pain, so I put myself to bed early, praying for the sweet relief of sleep.
I woke up around midnight feeling funny. My face was wet and felt oddly numb. I turned on a light and tapped Joe awake.
“Heysh, Shoe, dosh my fasch look shtrange?” I slurred.
“Jesus Christ, what happened to you?” Joe asked, recoiling in horror.
I stumbled to the bathroom mirror. The right side of my face was hugely swollen and mostly immobile. Clearly, I’d had a stroke. I dimly recalled a FW: FW: FW: email I’d received years ago that covered what to do when someone has a stroke. Were you supposed to check their tongue? Or wrap them in blankets? Was CPR or the Heimlich maneuver involved? Damn it all to hell, why am I always in such a rush? I should have paid attention to that shit. But of course I hadn’t. Strokes were something old people had. Delete.
After several hours of poking, prodding, peeing, and pricking, the kindly ER doctor calmly presented her diagnosis.
“You’ve got angioedema,” she said.
Didn’t angio mean heart? Or have something to do with sperm? And wasn’t edema some sort of swelling? Had I had a sperm-related heart attack? I’d just had my cholesterol levels checked, I’ll have you know, and I’d been told I had the heart of a twenty-year-old. Plus I hadn’t had sex in . . . Jeez, when was the last time I’d had sex? I really needed to start making that a priority.
“Angioedema is just a name for tissue swelling,” she explained. “It’s basically an allergic reaction. In this case, since your blood work ruled out almost everything else, my guess is it was the ibuprofen.”
At forty-three, I’d been taking ibuprofen for roughly all of ever. Perhaps not in the horse-killing quantities I’d ingested this time, but still. I’d followed the directions that were printed right there on the bottle and which you would assume were safety tested for exactly these sorts of purposes. Did one just up and develop random, potentially fatal allergies after a certain age? Yes, the doctor informed me. Yes, one did.
I was given a prescription for an EpiPen,* which is a giant hotdog-size syringe filled with epinephrine that people with severe, life-threatening allergies must carry at all times,* in case the rapid, sudden swelling that marks an allergic reaction occurs in the airway—which can cause suffocation and death. Should I abruptly feel as if I am being smothered, I am simply to remember instantly where I left my purse last, fish through bags of raisins and grocery receipts and thirty-seven lip glosses to unearth the stupid thing in the bowels of it, gingerly remove the cap, take a deep breath, jam the needle deep into my thigh, and not panic at all while I wait for my airway to open itself up again.
Like that’s going to happen.
(True story: Just this week I was in the bathroom helping my eight-year-old daughter get ready for school when I felt—and then heard—a rumbling. Then it got louder. I assumed it was her older sister upstairs doing one of her famously house-shaking hip-hop dance routines, until that one called from another downstairs room, “Mom, what’s happening?” Despite exhaustive, repeated training to do exactly the opposite, I screamed “EARTHQUAKE!” at the top of my lungs, grabbed the kid closest to me by the arm and pulled her frantically out the back door. I hadn’t “ducked and covered” as I’d been taught to do, and I had abandoned my husband and firstborn child to fend for themselves in a potentially deadly natural disaster. The quake passed relatively quickly and everyone emerged unscathed if a bit shaky, but I share this story to illustrate the fact that clearly I am not to be trusted to react rationally or intelligently in any life-threatening emergency situation.)
Still, I feel better knowing that EpiPen is almost definitely down there at the bottom of my purse. [Makes a mental note to check and also update will.]
“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When I realized I could tell it was going to rain because my knees ached.
—KERRY
In between one or another of the back episodes, I noticed that my shoulder had started making this creaky, popping sound whenever I rotated it. I waited a few weeks, hoping it would go away on its own, but it didn’t. In fact, it continued to get even creakier and poppier. Worried it would get to the point where a serious medical intervention would be required, I scheduled an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked.
“My shoulder is making this awful creaking and popping sound when I rotate it,” I told him.
“Let’s see,” he said, twisting my arm up and around in circles. It popped and creaked beautifully on demand.
“Yup, you’ve got crepitus,” he said, nodding his head.
“Crepitus?” I repeated, terrified. It sounded even worse than angioedema, like decrepit and corpse all rolled into one ugly, dam
ning word. Did I need surgery? Was I going to lose the use of my arm? Or have to have the entire arm amputated? Was it fatal?*
“What’s . . . crepitus?” I finally asked.
“It’s when your joints make popping and creaking sounds,” the surgeon explained patiently.
“Well, I could have guessed that,” I said with equal patience. “That’s why I’m here. But what is it? What causes it? How do you treat it?”
“The sound you hear is bone and cartilage rubbing together,” he told me. “It could be a sign of osteoarthritis. Or it could be just age.”
I’d known that my body was going to get weaker and saggier and quite possibly shorter and wider throughout this highly amusing maturation process . . . but louder?
The doctor didn’t recommend surgery, so I employed a strategic and clearly sound approach I came up with that I call ignoring it completely and continuing about my merry way. In time the creepy crepitus packed its bags and found a younger, healthier shoulder to annoy. Or maybe my ears are going, and I just can’t hear it anymore.
After the back, shoulder, and angioedema episodes, I woke up one day with a searing pain in my left foot.* Again, I tried to wait it out, and again, it continued to worsen. This time I sought out a foot specialist who diagnosed me with tendonitis and prescribed several weeks in a cast, the result of which was pretty much nothing. I moved on to physical therapy (because I have nothing but time to kill and money to burn!). When that didn’t work, I sought a second opinion—which was identical to the first, only this time the prescription was a combination of total immobility plus zero weight bearing, which meant a cast plus crutches.
Did you realize that you can’t do anything when you’re on crutches? You can’t vacuum, unload the dishwasher, make a stinking bed, or even carry your own cup of coffee. If you don’t have a laundry basket on wheels, you’re sort of screwed. And you think hot flashes suck on a regular day? Try breaking out in a full-body sweat while you’ve got two rubber-tipped sticks jammed into your armpits, where they’ve already rubbed off most of the adjacent skin. You have to sit down to put on and take off your goddamned underpants. What’s that? Your phone’s ringing but you left it outside on the patio and nobody is home to run and get it for you? Man, I hope it wasn’t Lottery Headquarters or that hot guy you met last night calling. If you’re young and on the fence about having children, the remote possibility that you might one day find yourself needing crutches is argument enough to bite the bullet and get yourself knocked up already. Because you’re going to need help.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 9