Aging. Really Aging!

   Readers of my blog will have noticed that I have posted a great many autobiographical pieces. This fact is grounded in two deeply-rooted motives, the first respectable, the second somewhat dubious. For many years, I have produced a lot of prose about myself, in books and articles and, more recently, on this blog.  No apologies; I am self-consciously reflective about my life and write about it more for myself than for others. Somehow this activity makes my thoughts about myself more objective: they are then out there to be looked at—by me, if by no one else.

   There is also a less respectable reason for of all that writing and those blog posts. As I have confessed, I am addicted to writing. Put that sentence together with the paragraph above and you won’t  be surprised to see another piece about me and probably others in the future.
   “Probably” is surely appropriate, if only because of the age I’ve already reached, namely over halfway between 89 and 90. Here I want to give  a brief account about what happened to me during that last year.

   Last summer (‘twas 2015) I went off to San Francisco with my grandson, Max, from Los Angeles, where we were both staying with Mark and Shannon, my son and his wife. We took the very scenic train northward, the course of which was interrupted only a few hours before reaching our goal by a puzzling extended stop that was revealed later to have resulted from the train’s running over a suicidal person in its path. We got to our hotel very late.

   The next day—or was it a day later?—I had to be transported to a hospital with what turned out to be a gall bladder “event.” I was not hospitalized for very long and benefited, faute de mieux, from visits by old friends whom I had hoped to encounter quite differently. I was very sorry that I could not introduce Max to the city I had lived in for so many years.

   To end this last San Francisco stay, Mark drove up from Los Angeles and we speeded South, mostly at night, to his house in Woodland Hills. I then had a couple of visits to physicians and returned to my home in Mexico City.

    But alas, those summer weeks were a kind of turning point; for the first time I came really to feel old. Unberufen teu teu teu (a fancy German way to say “touch wood”) I do not, so far, have any life-threatening ailments: heart, blood pressure, etc. are all OK. My one unambiguous disability is that since the late summer, my bladder has been on strike. After several methods of dealing with that fact, I now have a hole at the bottom of my stomach that creates a short path from my bladder to the catheter bag strapped to my leg. It needs emptied, in Pittsburghese, about every five hours, day and night—a life sentence.

    Everything else, while just as annoying, does not have so clear a medical diagnosis. My knees have been lousy for quite some time; they are just getting worse. So getting in and out of cars is a big deal. Physical therapy hasn't really helped. Walking is slower and more effort-full, but I try to do some every day. The worst is what I call wobbliness. My left leg that suffers from a botched operation some years ago is not staying put, but is getting ever less reliable. The amount of walking I do now is a fraction of what I did only a year ago; it aggravates a persistent muscle spasm on my back that has been attenuated but not eliminated by massages. My skin, never great, sports all sorts of bumps and itchy spots and frequent signs of broken blood vessels. I've fallen a few times (fall is what old people do) with real consequences but not debilitating ones. To sum up, I attend to a lot of nuisance symptoms--not an exciting occupation--while my world (and body mass!) have shrunk a lot.
   Thank goodness, I go out to eat with the family and I get to some concerts. But most of my life is centered on my room, bright and very pleasant and practically furnished. I am remarkably well taken care of in the City of Mexico.

   Mentally, I find my memory affected, short term and long term, but not, so far, in a seriously debilitating way. For now, I don’t find the analytic function of my mind really compromised, but then  I’m not the best judge of that. I treasure the fact that I can maintain my blog, of which this piece will be the 165^th post. I skip comments on other aspects of aging, mine, or anyone’s, but be assured that I am also subject to them.

   Sounds benign? I suppose it is. But then these objective descriptions do not express what it feels like subjectively. But then, what else is new?