“Welcome to sixty…for it is the springtime of your old age.” Such was the birthday greeting I received from my friend, Louie (who, not incidentally, was several years older than I when he sent it).
Getting older is an endless series of accommodations — to one’s expectations, hopes, dreams, and most acutely, health. Things we cavalierly took for granted in our youth insidiously become the stuff of ancient history.
Gone are the days when, no matter what the ailment, you’d go to see your doctor, and, nine times out of ten, you were sent away with a bemused, “You’re fine, now get outta here!” Over the ensuing decades, that ratio gradually reverses, to where it eventually becomes the exception, rather than the rule. You come to expect previously unheard-of phrases such as, “I’m not sure,” or “Let’s keep an eye on this,” or, perhaps most disheartening of all, “Yeah, that happens.”
Early one spring morning, I made my routine post-coffee sojourn to the bathroom and — um, let’s see, how shall I put this? — I noticed a distinctly different “hue” than the one to which I had grown accustomed over the previous six decades of my life. I wouldn’t say that I was exactly alarmed…but, frankly, I was exactly alarmed. In a state of quasi-controlled panic, I immediately rushed in to see my doctor. He calmly informed me that there are lots of possible causes, and he patiently waded through his Q&A checklist. It started out innocently enough. “Eating beets or rhubarb?” “No.” “Dehydrated from exercise?” “No.” “In any discomfort or pain?” “No.” And so it went, back and forth. Finally, he emitted the sound that I have come to dread from doctors: “Hmm.” I tried to appear composed, belying the visible thumping in my chest. “So Doc, what do you think?” I vaguely remember him saying something about running some labs and getting a CAT scan, and that it might be kidney stones…but it could be something else. “Like what?” I choked out, desperately trying to convince myself that he wasn’t going to say what I knew he was going to say anyway. “Well,” he began, “we want to make sure it isn’t cancer.” I swallowed…hard. He tried to reassure me by telling me that even though I wasn’t in any pain, it still could be kidney stones. But the only thing that resonated in my head was “cancer.” (“Cancer”!?)
Now, I’d suffered the unadulterated agony of kidney stones before. I am convinced that Satan himself took particular delight as he cunningly designed these evil little burrs of
torture — which ever-so-sadistically and ever-so-slowly carve and slice their way down the delicate tissues of your tiny, unsuspecting ureter tubes, burrowing toward their inevitable destination to you-know-where. You are unceremoniously stripped of all pride and dignity, driven from your feet, then to your knees, then to the floor, reduced to a pathetic mass of sniveling, writhing protoplasm. It’s an excruciating ordeal that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. (Okay, well maybe my worst enemy…)
So, it was down to this: kidney stones or cancer. Mind you the CAT scan was no stroll on the beach — the cold intravenous dye, the physical immobility, the claustrophobia. But none of that compared to the agony of waiting…and waiting…and waiting for the results.
When my doctor finally contacted me with the outcome, I was flooded with emotion, and instinctively called my mother. “Mom, I have great news, I’ve got kidney stones!” (And I meant it.) “Thank God! David, I am so happy for you!” (And she meant it.)
As you get older, you keep lowering your standards for what is acceptable. And in the third act, the absence of catastrophic news is great news.