More random thoughts from "Oldest Living Blogger"

After I got home from the LifeLabs medical testing place this morning, feeling lucky I lived long enough to get out of there alive, I came home, turned on the electric kettle, which fortunately shuts itself off, and then while waiting for it to boil, I fell asleep, resting on the edge of the bed. 

I must have been tired, because looking at the clock as I awoke, I was shocked to see that it was minutes to midnight. And now that I'm fully awake again, and have had something to eat, here I am, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Nobody goes out to party someplace at a quarter to one in the morning - certainly no one my age. And that got me thinking about my age.

As someone trying to be a wit once said, "My health isn't the problem. It's my age!" And the trouble with an age like mine is that most of those whom you've treasured as friends and advisors, or enjoyed as lovers or confidants, or even found interesting as protagonists in this play called 'life' are gone. Not gone as in gone on vacation, or gone to Whistler for the weekend, or gone to Florida for the winter, but just simply gone. As in 'no longer with us' - departed; cut down in their prime, so to speak. Dead.

And I'm not. Not right now. Not yet. But the writing's on the wall. And simply redecorating won't fix that. I haven't really got the desire to spend a week moving furniture to paint walls anyway. I have to save my strength for enduring those doctors' offices, germ-filled but sterile-looking, while I'm poked and prodded, and otherwise treated with indignity, or being chased off to yet another "lab" where some generic nurse-looking person pretends to give a damn for three minutes while wishing she was having lunch with the love of her life somewhere worth being. It's not only my age that's a problem, it's where I'm spending half of my time these days trying to survive growing older.

And all those doctors and nurse-looking persons who probably can't apply a Band-Aid and get it right-side-out aren't there to fix the problems I'm really having - the aches, the pains, the wrinkles, the itches I can't scratch - no.  They're only interested in the problems, hypothetical, mostly, from which they can maximize their incomes looking for inside me. So instead of seeing my mundane general practitioner, I'm herded off to visit urologists, or gastroenterologists. People whose titles and job descriptions I can barely comprehend without resort to a medical dictionary, and sometimes, not then. But Thank God for the Merck Manual, or I'd be scared out of ten years growth by things they want to do to me. All in the name of survival. Theirs - not mine!