So 46 may not seem that old, I haven’t even gotten my AARP packet yet, but my life and career goals for age 50, my mental crossing over into ‘old-age’ has been approaching at an alarming speed and with a flurry of activities to drive my mindset there.
In October of 1999, months after my second child was born and months before the fated millennium midnight and all the potential chaos that would ensue, I was being told I had hypo-thyroidism and would have to take a daily prescription medicine for the rest of my life. This was the first time I felt truly mortal, and that I was not young anymore. I was glad civilization did not break down after midnight 1999 as I had prescriptions to fill.
Skip forward 12 years to last Halloween when I was being told I had invasive ductile carcinoma of the breast I had a similar, yet hugely magnified, emotional experience of mortality and sense of loss of youth. Between the two events, I felt I had reclaimed my youth by getting my weight down with walking and exercise. Eventually I found my way into a running and triathlon crowd that culminated in a personal finish of the Ford Ironman Triathlon – a 2.5 mile swim, a 112 mile bike and 26.2 mile full marathon run – on the day of my 45th birthday in a respectable thirteen and a half hours. Age never seemed so irrelevant as that instant my feet crossed the finish line.
These last eight months, since getting my cancer diagnosis, has been a different journey, but one that has brought all the others into context and one in which age is a constant factor – in treatment options, in recurrence and survival statistics, and in personal choices for medical treatment. I opted for going through a double mastectomy and four rounds of chemotherapy even though it was early stage breast cancer and localized – 46 seemed young enough to take every possible measure to assure I need to take this particular journey only once. I now have more than a dozen meds on my active prescription list, some I will take for at least five years, and the thyroid medicine for the rest of my life, which I decided to be about 96 years. But my med list is as robust a list as many of our bona-fide senior citizens – which inevitably has made me rethink my assumptions about both our seniors and the extent of long-term medical assistance.
I believe that what matters most at this point and going forward is what makes us feel young emotionally and physically. Laughter, friendship, love, ease of pain and movement, restoration of abilities and senses. In this day and age of medical advances we all are getting the opportunity to live longer, but more importantly, and where my optimism springs from, is in this later phase, the ‘golden years’, we are also being given the opportunity to live better. Truly better.
