What a drag it is getting old

I've been thinking about aging recently. More than I usually do, I mean. Mostly that's because my dad, now 83, isn't doing very well in a number of ways, and when one is 83 and in not very good shape and has preexisting issues, one new event can beget a cascade of things getting worse.

He had a fall a couple weeks ago that broke his shoulder and required a relatively minor surgical procedure to put the bone back together, but it was a general anesthesia surgery and there is a thing I now know about called "postoperative delirium" that is common in elderly folk. The anesthesia can have a delayed effect of kind of scrambling your neurons, all the worse if you've already got some sort of cognitive decline issue. It's usually temporary, but, again, if one already has an issue it might just accelerate that. 

Who knows. I certainly don't, I'm just learning about these things as they come up. Anyway, Dad's had trouble recuperating and is back in the hospital with balance issues, having fallen down a few more times, and with evident postoperative delirium. His memory's been wonky for a while now, but now he's being especially weird, according to my sources.

So there's that. He and Marty were up my way a little over a year ago, and that was the first time I had truly clocked how frail Dad had become, but he was still managing cognitively. Memory was a little suspect, but to a relatively minor degree. I went to visit them last fall and things were worse but still following a kind of expected track. With this latest series of events, "expected track" is just a meaningless phrase.

I may head down to see them ahead of schedule; I wasn't planning on it until October, but I may well move that up. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I, too, am getting older, but thankfully my issues are more on the "annoyance" end of the scale, at least so far. For instance, my sprained finger still hasn't completely healed. That's annoying. I now weigh 10 pounds more than I did 15 years ago and 40 more than what was locked into my brain as my normal mass from the time I was a teenager until at least my mid-thirties. I have a protruding midsection. Not like many Americans do (certainly many in my age cohort), I still have no trouble fastening my 30" waist jeans, but it nevertheless feels "not-me." My bad cholesterol is high despite not having eaten land meat since 1987 (for which I blame genetics—Mom was always rather slight and she had the same issue).

So to maybe address these things (not the sprained finger, but the rest) I've been making a point to be more active than I have been. I'm a long way from the days when I bicycled everywhere, and I've no illusions about doing that again, but I have been getting out either on the bike or on foot (or in a pinch using the indoor stationary bike) for an hour or more a few times a week. Generally, it feels pretty good.

Not today, though. Today I got a reminder of something that is not related to getting older, it's just a thing I've always dealt with—overexertion. I think this is related to my lower-than-normal blood pressure, which has been relatively constant for me, but again, I'm only semi-informed about such things. (I do know it's not a heart problem, as I had a doctor once order me one of those treadmill stress tests, which achieved making me overexert and barf all over the machine but also showed no cardiac issues while doing it.) Anyway, for as long as I can recall if I pushed myself beyond a certain threshold of exercise—usually while biking, but once on a hike up Tiger Mountain (on a date—that was embarrassing, and there was no next date) and a couple of times playing ultimate frisbee—I feel overheated, slightly dizzy, and eventually nauseous. The remedy is to lie down and breathe deeply until the heat escapes my head and functionality returns; sometimes there's also barfing.

Anyway, I went out around the neighborhood on the bicycle late this afternoon and, knowing I'm not in the kind of shape I used to be in, tried to keep to as flat a route as I could. This is greater Seattle, so nothing is going to be flat, but I intended to avoid more challenging hills. This was going OK until I found myself across the border to Edmonds and didn't know the best way back; before I knew it I'd committed to a stretch of downhill that I knew was going to be a problem. Then my available options all had inclines. I took a breather for a couple of minutes and opted to walk the bike up the shortest of the options, a steep one-block length that would get me back on relatively flat ground soonest.

It probably was the best option, but when I reached the top of the hill I had to lie down, just off the street in the dirt and dead grass near someone's front yard. After about ten minutes I was able to get up again, drink some water, and proceed on my way home, opting not to stop by the store on the way as originally planned. When I reached my garage and got off the bike, yep, dizziness and vomit. Didn't even make it inside first. The upside is that after the vomit stage, things get back to normal pretty fast, so I came inside, cleaned up my face, and watched the Mariners win for once and all is well.

Except I still have a protruding gut.