You Know What Part

Tag: Health

  • Old

    I recently turned 50. In my more honest moments, I did not expect to make it to 50. I almost didn’t. But, here I am, likely in the best shape of my life since I was a teenager, down 60 pounds since the heart attack, numbers on medical tests are good (mostly), and I can buy clothes in sizes I’ve not been able to do before.

    I also have 60% of my expected heart capacity (ejection rate or something) so I can run, but only for 4 minutes at a time. I have what’s likely permanent nerve damage from diabetes, and I have a pill case that I have learned how to pack efficiently in order to close the lid. What I’m saying is I have ailments, not just injuries. I have conditions and remedies and they all sound remarkably like the things I heard my “old” family members talk about when I was a kid.

    [Sidebar. Dear pharmacies, when you fill a prescription, and that prescription is fulfilled by 30-90 pills the size of cooked rice grains, those pills don’t need to be delivered in a jar the size of a pop can. We have to store these things, sometimes a lot of them, in tiny medicine cabinets. Right size, y’all]

    But, I am, by any measure and in my nieces’ estimations, Old. And while I am fit(ish) and have a normal BMI for the first time, I also remain vain and slightly… not obsessed but.. preoccupied with aspects of my appearance. I shaved my beard, for instance, because I wanted people to see the weight loss. It was also more white than salt-and-peppery, which I thought made me look even older. I even bought not one, but two electric razors (rotary and foil) trying to simplify that process, only to realize I kind of like the act of shaving with a razor. Of course, now I have two electric razors I can’t return and rarely use, but they’re the best I could get.

    Which is another quirk of being Old I find oddly adopted: buying up. My partner and I often said the cliche “you get what you pay for” was true, but then bought a mid- to low-range version because, well, we didn’t make much for a long time. But through our 40s, we did ok job-wise and also cleared much of our recurring debt and found ourselves, while not debt-free, solvent in a way we hadn’t been our entire lives. And I found, as I was actually needing to buy new clothes, that I could go into stores and just… buy something. Michael Jordon U-M sweatshirt from the bookstore because I was cold and forgot a jacket? Sure. Pricey khakis as a ‘reward’ for hitting a weight-loss milestone? You betcha. Laptop I don’t need just because I wanted it? Embarrassingly, yes. It is a dangerous feeling and I find I have to be careful about why I’m buying something now because solvent != rich.

    I am also beyond the halfway point in my career. Right now, that’s meant working for the last two decades at a university, a job I originally thought would be for 4 years. I like working for a university, not always enjoying the work itself, but that’s part of any job. But I’m also now An Old there, with 20 years at the institution and a fading list of accomplishments. I nod to other long-timers, we who are fewer each year as our colleagues take jobs with vendors or retire. I don’t think I can prosper out of the higher ed space and, frankly, I’m good at navigating the politics, culture, and pace. I don’t think I’d be good in industry with those skills as they are also now fine-tuned to a very specific wavelength of bullshit,

    All of this is meandering thoughts circling a point, though. Much of my life has reached a past-halfway point. That likely happened chronologically a while ago, but the Law of Round Numbers means that it’s top of mind for me now. It’s an odd realization–and I intend that in the “becoming real” meaning of the phrase–to live in, being conscious a little too often of your mortality, of your growing irrelevance, and of how fragile the meat sack carrying my mind around actually is. I don’t have deep thoughts about this, this mildly-coherent post isn’t going to blow up into a New Yorker piece about this 50-year-old white guy’s existential revelations.

    I’m just old now. I have things I want to do, but will run out of time to do them, so priorities start to shift. And it’s a new experience for me that I thought earned noting.

  • Not Dead Yet

    On April 15 2024, around 5:30 pm, I took out the garbage and recycling, something that required two 15-yard-long round trips from the back of my lot to the curb. The first trip took some effort and left me winded, with a little pain in my chest. At the end of the second trip, I thought I was going to collapse from the pain in my chest. I slowly dragged myself inside, sat in our recliner, and drank some water. I checked my Apple Watch repeatedly, watching my heart rate slowly fall from the mid-130s to just above 100. The pain ebbed as my heart rate dropped, but didn’t stop. Breathing was an effort. Something was clearly wrong.

    My partner returned from walking the dog around 10 minutes later to find me in the chair, looked at me and said “are you ok?” Until that question, I’d been negotiating internally, talking myself out of the obvious, sure that things would work themselves out. But as I looked back at her, I heard the words come out of my mouth and I knew that I both wanted to say them and that life had changed. “We need to go to the hospital.”

    4 hours later, I was in an ICU room at University of Michigan Hospital recovering from surgery. Dr Sukul, who had clearly been on his way home, had been pulled back to save my life. He put a 48mm-long stent in my left anterior descending artery, removing and re-opening a 90+% blockage. I’ve seen the video of him working. I lost 40% of the function of the lower chamber of my heart, likely permanently.

    I’d had a STEMI, an ST-elevation myocardial infarction, a fairly dangerous type of heart attack. It’s not the widow maker, but it’s close enough.

    Black and white photo of a mostly-blocked artery displayed on a Dell computer monitor

    A lifetime of poot diet, alcohol, and sitting on my ass had caught up with me. I’d been given a renewal of my lease on life, through nothing more than the happenstance of living near enough to one of the premier medical institutions in the world. Not that many years ago, I may not have survived due to a lack of facilities; I had hours to live.

    And so, today, I sit at the same desk, the same computer, typing with the same fingers I stared at in an ER triage bay as an RN asked me what my advance directives were. I have completed cardiac therapy, joined a gym (and actually go), changed my diet, and lost 35-ish pounds. My PCP shows me numbers that fit into ranges that people like. I have smaller clothes. I lift weights. I can run for two and a half minutes, 5 times, in a half hour.

    I’m “healthy”.

    I’m still here.

    I’m lucky, something that, in retrospect, I’ve always felt. But only in retrospect. I can never go into a situation feeling luck is on my side. Only in hindsight do I think “oh, wow, that was lucky.”

    I don’t have great insights from the experience, only lessons I have to live with forever. I have drugs (sorry “medications”), tests, and a growing hate for push notifications from apps that track appointments and tests and meals and blood sugar and blood pressure and dosages and… yeah

    But I’m here. I’m glad to be here. The alternative isn’t attractive.

    Yet…

    I wait for the other shoe to drop every day. I don’t know that there is one, but now I wait. I have a family history that is not great. No one seems to think it matters. Tests say I don’t have genetic markers. Other things aren’t genetically inherited.

    Yet..

    Again, I don’t have lessons to impart here. Be thankful for the time you have. Tell the people you care about, no matter how platonic they are, how you feel. My near-miss was arterial plaque. It could have easily been an F350 driven by someone on their phone.

    I’m not dead. Not yet. I’m still here.

    “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
    ― Catherine Aird