It
suddenly occurred to me yesterday that although I call these pieces chronicles
from the tenth decade, most of them have been mere reminiscence, about earlier
times in my life, and that maybe it is time to explain what it is like to be
90. I began to think about this when I decided to get out the walking stick I
have had since I fractured the Achilles tendon on my right leg a couple of
years ago. It never properly healed,
left me with a slight limp, which naturally has placed more strain on the left
leg. I never found the walking stick made much difference but recently the
strain on my left leg has re-emerged as a tweak in my groin, making walking
more laborious than before.
This Achilles problem was caused by
my false pride. I was visiting a friend in Dubrovnik, Croatia for three
months. Dubrovnik is a small town
surrounded by high stone walls, within which almost all of the streets are too
narrow to accommodate vehicles, and precipitously steep. Every morning I went
for a walk, up 287 steps, then down into the town again, and was quietly proud
that I could still do it at 88. In my
last days there I felt a slight soreness in my ankle, but did not think
anything about it until I returned to Montreal. I had my bicycle in the shop
for a tune-up, and when I emerged with it, I pushed off with my right leg, and
snap! I felt my Achilles go, knew what
it was (thanks to my years of following games), and that it would take months
to heal; and off I went immediately to the hospital, where I was equipped with
one of those cumbersome boots for the next three months or so. Gone was my
bike, gone the 30 km rides I used to take around the periphery of Ottawa, or
even the quick rides along de Maisonneuve to the coffee shop on Peel and
Sherbrooke.
Although I had noticed, ever since I
turned 80, that the debilitating effects of old age increased exponentially as
one lived on, this reduction in mobility was the first effect that really made
a difference to my life, restricting severely the range that I could travel on
two legs, something I had always liked to do. In the previous 80 years I had
been pretty free of health worries: tonsils out in my forties; prostate gland scraped
in my seventies; a couple of attacks of
gout; high blood pressure --- nothing that couldn’t be kept under control. Sex,
of course, was well into my past by his time.
It was a different story in the following
year as I approached the tenth decade, and became more brutally aware of the
joys of old age. Three days after I returned from another trip to Dubrovnik (my
last, I fear, given my debilitated condition), I was suddenly assailed by a
failure to urinate, blocked by blood discharges. These discharges I had had for
some 30 years, but they had never before blocked my urinating function. I had
always supposed the bleeding was caused by an inefficient job done on my
prostate, but that was mere supposition, arising from my intense medical
ignorance. I had discovered that the presiding doctor had moved to Alabama, so
evidently nothing good could be expected of such an idiot. A sentiment typical
of my medical wisdom….
In the emergency room at the Jewish General my
problem was cleared by means of an overnight catheter that I wore for 20 hours.
It was a painful and pretty horrendous business, for whenever the flow blocked,
the nurses had to come along, clear it out by means of agitating it and
re-establishing the catheter. But if I thought I was over the worst, I had
another think coming. Less than three weeks later, the day before my
eighty-ninth birthday, I was due to go to an annual dinner given by my union
ACTRA to its pensioners. I was looking forward to it, for it was being held in
the Ritz-Carlton, a posh hotel where, in the 1950s, as a reporter on the hotel
beat, I was a frequent guest at the opening night of the American singers they
booked in the Ritz Café, most of whom I had interviewed earlier in the day. I
had never set foot in the place since then, believing it to be beyond my means,
and was remembering the many excellent dinners we had had here. On the way I
had to call into a UPS office to send something to my daughter in Costa Rica.
While in that office I began to tremble in a way I had never known before, and
by the time I arrived at the hotel I was shaking all over like a mammy in a
Lagos ju-ju club. I asked for water, sat down, and slowly began to realize I
wasn’t going to make the dinner. The hosts bundled me into a taxi to send me
home, and the last thing I remember was getting out of the taxi and struggling
to step up on to the pavement. When I woke up I was in a hospital. Unfortunately it was a French hospital, and my
inability to understand what was being said to me in French --- another of the
joys of old age, that had gradually overcome me!--- was compounded by the fact
that they insisted that everyone who came into my room wear a mask. At first
they thought I had pneumonia with the possibility of tuberculosis down the
road; but after assiduous investigation they decided I had a kidney infection,
and put me on a rigorous diet of antibiotics
which lasted for nine days. As we left the hospital, the reigning specialist
muttered to one of my sons that a man of my age normally didn’t survive what I
had been through.
Okay, one up for me. But four days
out of hospital, my urination problem hit me again with a vengeance. Back into
the Emergency Room, where they managed to relieve the problem, allowing me to
have a cystoscope three or four days later. This was a veritable horror show in
which a urologist took a ton of blood clots out of my bladder and told me if my
problem reoccurred within the next 24 hours I should return to the emergency and
insist they finish the job.
By the end of the next day it had reoccurred,
and my daughter (visiting me by his time) accompanied me back to the hospital
for another catheter. This time, a young nurse tried unsuccessfully to fit the
catheter, but failed, and decided to leave it to someone else. Fortunately, in
trying she had unblocked the system, so after an anxious night in the hospital
I was allowed to go home without treatment. Blood continued to flow out of me
for the next four days before, suddenly, like magic, it just stopped,
disappeared from my urine, and has never been seen since.
I’ve never been able to decide since
whether to the hospitals the aged are
just a damn nuisance, or whether they welcome the fact that the older you are,
the more you can be poked and prodded, the more likely it is that they will
find things wrong with you. As I passed through the various scopes ---
colonoscope (up your bum--2), cystoscope (down your penis --2), brachyoscope
(down your throat ), CT scan (if I remember correctly, an all-over examination
the results of which could keep the doctors in work for years), ETC or ECT or something like that, XYZ and
Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, I felt I had
to tell them: my body is 90 years old.
The more you keep looking, the
more inefficiencies you will find in it.
Indeed, one of the things I have discovered
--- I am on to the Aged Wisdom section of the story now --- is that one by one,
piece by piece, the various organs that keep you alive begin to wear out ---
eyes, ears, nose and throat, stomach, kidneys, lungs, heart --- you name it, at
90 it isn’t working as well as it used to. What do the young know of such conditions
as the deviated septum (crooked nostril), post-nasal drip (always blocking your
throat with phlegm, thanks to --- you’ve
got it, the deviated septum), the swelling of the prostate gland, the five
times a night up to the bathroom, the slow dribble, if that, that is the old-age urinating function, the
loss of hearing (inclining the young, especially the impatient young, to repeat
what they had just said in quarter-time, and at double volume, as if you are a
blithering idiot), the shortness of vision….you name it, bro, I have it, or
have had it, all, and more.
Now, just to finish off, here I am
almost 12 months later, with lung cancer. I spotted it in April. Three X-rays,
two lung scans, another CT scan, a wrong diagnosis of pneumonia, a reluctant
admission it could be cancer, followed by five radiation treatments, and now
the prospect of a miracle cure from some expensive pill used to treat the rare mutation of my
tumour that I am promised I have…. All to be followed I am sure, by an early
death. So here I am, patience itself,
smiling beatifically, always gentle and unassuming just as I have always
been,, immensely grateful for our socialized medicine system, and, in spite of my manifold sins and crimes,
omissions and mistakes, cruelties and haughty
indifference, not at all worried about being recycled into
the continuing drama of life on planet Earth.
So that is my one piece of Aged
Wisdom: there don't seem to be many joys of old age, even when you are a
non-querulous, unexcitable, straight-forward, easily pleased guy like me. Is it any wonder that in these
sere years of my aged contentment, my mantra has become Wot the hell, wot the
hell, toujours gai, toujours gai!
Yes, after all, wot the hell?
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