I'll be glad when this year is over. I'm not talking about the calendar year or the school year. I looking transmit to the last day of the year I turned fifty. Yep, I am 50 years old, although I have been told I don't look at day over 49. Before the next full moon, I will be over the hill at the ripe old age of 51, and I'm looking transmit to that day. Why? Because turning fifty was tough, and I'm looking transmit to the end of this era.
Back when I was a young whippersnapper in my mid-forties, some of my more mature friends warned me about turning fifty. They said the human body is programmed to fall apart at that age, much like your car on the day the warranty expires. Even at the age of forty-nine, I suspected these old codgers were exaggerating, jealous of my youth and trying to put the fear of A.A.R.P. In me. How can a strong, robust man of 49 just start falling apart in a mere 365 days? No way will it happen to me.
True Glass Door Refrigerator
I think the first sign that the law is true showed up as an ache to my lower back. Being a cowpoke most of my life, I was accustomed to body aches and strained muscles, but this pain was different. It was lower and often shot through my rump and down my leg. With my small knowledge of the human body and way to the internet, I discovered I was suffering from sciatica. I recalled my great-aunt suffered from this, but she was an old lady. How can I have an old lady malady? Naw, I probably have a chipped vertebra from getting thrown from a horse years ago. I don't have stinking sciatica. Not yet anyway.
It wasn't many weeks later when my body considered to warn me that the sciatic nerve has friends, and some times they like to get together and throw a wild party. Apparently, these nerves that hang out along your spine have a tendency to get pinched by protruding disks when vertebrae get bent all out of shape. I don't know what I did to my spine, but it now resembles the road through Devil's Backbone, and one day a bunch of the nerves decided to play one hellacious game of Twister.
I remember hearing some of my elders talk about "throwing out" their backs and being laid up in bed for days. I figured with my lifestyle and occupation, this may some day happen to me when I'm in my sixties. Au contraire, my friend. My 50-year old back decided it needed some bed-rest, and I spent three days flat on my back, loaded with muscle relaxers and out-dated pain meds.
Thanks to the masterful hands of a chiropractor, I was back on my feet in a few days, feeling pretty good for a guy half a century old. I was back to my old self, abusing my body like it belonged to a twenty-year old. Then, just like your 10-year old Chevy, something else has to fall apart.
This time the angry god of geriatrics reared his vengeful head and sank his sharp fangs into my big toe.
I have jammed my toe some times in my life, been stepped on by horses and a few cows, and even broke a toe or two, but nothing compares to the pain that inexplicably developed in my big toe. The pain was so severe I went to a minor emergency clinic the next day, reasoning I must've broken the toe somehow.
It took the physician less than a small to diagnose my infliction as gout. Gout? That's an old fart's disease. No way in the world can I have gout. I must've injured my toe doing fence work, the trauma blocking all memory of the accident. That makes more sense than gout.
Just to satisfy my curiosity, and to get more pain medication, I hobbled in to see my personal physician for a second opinion. He also diagnosed me as having a bout of gout. For you men who may now be fifty or will be soon, let me tell you something about gout. It is caused by uric acid crystals settling in a joint, typically a big toe. It feels like man crushed up some broken glass, mixed it with a swarm of angry fire ants, and injected it all into the base of your toe.
I asked the physician what causes gout in a youngish man as myself. Apparently, inevitable food and drinks may lead to gout. Red meat and fish have been known to cause this disease, but the chief theorize of gout is beer. Now hold on one cotton-pickin' minute! We're talking cold beer, the nectar of the red-necked gods! Beer may be the cause of this hellish agony that I was suffering, and the physician advised me to cut back on my consumption. I informed the doc that he should go ahead and chop that toe off because there's no way I'm going to stop eating beef and drinking beer. Find me a surgeon who'll amputate my big toe and replace it with a bottle opener.
One good thing about getting older is that I seem to be getting wiser. I have discovered things that a younger man might not notice. Like recycled paper makes newsprint blurry these days. A decade ago, before the newspaper recycling fad began, I could read the paper without glasses.
Something else I've noticed is that bags of feed that I used to carry with ease now seem to weigh more than before. Although the bag claims it holds 50 pounds, my muscles argue that it weighs closer to sixty pounds. It must be a recycled bag from years ago.
With nearly a full year of being fifty under my belt, I feel like I should help you men out there who aren't sure if they are old or not. Here are a few helpful clues in determining your age status:
1. If you look in your medicine cabinet and observation your athlete's foot medicine and sports cream have been supplanted by Metamucil and Preparation-H, you have gotten old.
2. If your pharmacist recognizes you on the street, you may be old.
3. If you have hair growing out of your ears, and it's gray, then you are surely old.
4. If you have your chiropractor on speed dial, then you are getting old and decrepit.
5. When getting out of bed, if your bones creak louder than the box springs, then you have turned into an old man.
6. If you attend your high school reunion and swap stories with your buddies about recent curative procedures, then you all have gotten old.
7. If you brag more on your cholesterol levels than your golf scores, then you may be a geezer.
8. If your beloved team is no longer the Cowboys or the Spurs but is now the team consisting of your cardiologist, urologist and proctologist, then, dude, you positively are old.
9. If you can recall the name of your second grade educator but don't remember why you are standing at the open refrigerator door, you're probably looking for prune juice, old man.
10. If your physician tells you have gout, congratulations, you, too are now an old fart.
I hope this column helps some of you men out there who are dealing with age issues. Remember, the first step with coping with getting old is recognizing the symptoms. Then you can enter denial. As for you women out there who are going through the change of life, don't look for me to write about that; I'll leave the real scary stuff to Stephen King.
I shape that once I turn 51, life will get better. Since turning fifty is "over the hill", then I'll be cruising downhill for the next five decades. Hopefully the second stretch of life's highway will have fewer potholes.
You Know You're Old When
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