Keeping Things On the Up-and-Up

Once the front edge of the Boomer cohort began to reach its senior years, lifestyle and healthcare advertisers seized the opportunity to re-brand age 70 as the new fifty. I’m one of these ‘new’ septuagenarians and, to help you plan ahead if you haven’t joined us yet, let me give you some details on how I achieve the miracle of age stasis through the technical and chemical wizardry of modern medicine.

Let’s start at wake-up where, groggily, I open my eyes to find them full of goo. I lurch out of bed, careful to have my feet hit the floor evenly, and totter over to the can to round off my night with another hard-to-direct trickly pee. I grope through the drawer that holds my extensive store of pharmaceuticals to find an eyelid cleanser. I apply its special hi-tech froth to each lid. I’m in luck if I don’t scratch an eye as my far sight makes this mirror-based manoeuvre quite tricky. I have clinical dry eye – an itchy condition that provides a bragging advantage during chitchats between seniors.
As each eye in turn is to be kept shut for several minutes, I thank the elder gods that I practiced hard in childhood at winking. The process though sorely tries my still Type A personality, which attempts to kill time by grabbing one-eyed for the blinds to let in the day while fumbling for the remote in an attempt to get cable TV’s take on the weather.

Once I’ve washed off my lids, I head for the shower. My still-recovering vision and weak sense of balance make for uncertain progress once inside the glass. If I don’t scald myself or crack the frame stumbling I consider my day to be starting out well. After drying off, I grab a Q-tip and the rubbing alcohol bottle and bend down to dry between my toes. If I haven’t put my back out straightening up afterwards, that’s another victory.

Back in the bedroom I prise my hearing aids out of their overnight cleaning device. My trifocal eyeglasses really do need a clean before wearing but I need them right away to locate and push back in the tiny batteries that power up the aids. After some fiddling, my regular nighttime chorus of tinnitus dims enough for the reassuring sounds of a household already in action to penetrate to my attention.

If it hasn’t already slipped off to plug the shower’s floor drain, after wiping my specs, I peel off the medicated Band Aid that’s been softening a persistently painful corn. I paste anti-fungal onto the other big toe’s nail and wear Birkenstocks sockless over breakfast until the lotion is dry.
To my bowl of muesli and fresh fruit I add psyllium seed, glucosamine and plain yoghurt (for calcium), and count out my tablets and capsules, about a dozen in all shapes and sizes. I try not to think about how many ailments they are meant to solve. They go down best via a restorative mug of strong tea, without which I may stumble when eventually getting down off the kitchen bar stool. To finish off I delve into a tray on the counter for asthma inhalers, after which I gargle vigorously. Oh, and I mustn’t forget a morning squeeze of an Rx anti-inflammatory into my eyes.
Back upstairs to some sensible shoes – I threw out my fashionable footwear; they were an inessential conceit. If my day is to include any serious leg action, I’ll have to strap on a plastic-and-metal leg brace to stop one damaged knee from wobbling alarmingly (not to worry – I’m next on a knee surgeon’s wait list).

Folk have learnt not to expect me before mid-morning and, as I travel through my shortened day, an evening round of pill popping isn’t too far away. I recall this takes care of a half dozen more infirmities though I can’t always remember what. The tablets go down over supper with a glass of virtually taste-free near-beer (for weight control). Before I leave the table, in goes another round of sore eyes relief. It’s now appropriate to seek out my cardio-chair to spend ten minutes with a microwave-zapped flax bag covering my eyes. After, I’m allowed to read a little or watch TV provided I don’t overdo it.

An approaching bedtime calls for yet another routine – there’s that toe painting again, then reapplying the plaster and, after brushing my deteriorating dentition with a special restorative paste, slipping a ‘nightguard’ against tooth grinding over my top set. Next comes Velcro-ing onto my wrist a carpal-tunnel-syndrome prevention brace. Then I must smear a protective strip of ointment over each bottom eyelid. This causes a visual blurring that has me hoping like hell that the dogs have settled out of the way as I turn out the room light and lurch across to our bed. Any day soon a crash-landing is in the cards. I just hope someone outside hears the noise; WW III won’t wake my spouse.

I must admit there’s one component I haven’t yet figured out – I’m still pondering where I might fit in the full fruit of this lifestyle improvement regime, the leisurely fornications that it promised would keep me on the up-and-up.

Still Making a Good Living at 70?

From the Toronto Globe&Mail newspaper money guru -

'The new retirement age is 70: U.S. personal finance guru Suze Orman says that if you stop working in your 60s, you might need to support yourself for another 30 years. How can you afford to live well into your 90s? One way is by working until age 70.

 

To some extent, this is a U.S. perspective driven by higher health care costs than we face in Canada. But Ms. Orman is definitely onto something in terms of how longer lifespans are affecting personal finance. If we live longer, working past 65 can make sense from both an emotional and financial point of view. “Every dollar you don’t spend in your 60s is a dollar that can keep growing for your 70s and beyond,” she says.'

 

The trouble with nominating 70 as the new standard end-of-work date is that these days during and after our 50s much more effort than in the past is spent on living healthier and sustaining body functionality, with the result that most of us take increasingly longer to die. Often we now get a late life of long-tail decline rather than an abrupt and dramatic end. Vigour decreases and many more 'parts' need attention. Modern medicine and nutrition helps keep us functioning to a degree but not with the focus and endurance needed for today's working world.

I doubt I'm any more capable in my early 70s of the effort required to have anyone pay me a wage that my dad was at that age. I just spend way more personal time with health care providers (now an old guy's 'best friends' and his main source of Xmas cards) than he could.

Being Ian Anderson

Not long ago a fellow boomer recalled for me that I share a name with a now-legendary rock singer. As he happens to be about my height and age, and we share an accent, I have in the past been asked for my autograph. On several occasions when he and his band were in Town, male store clerks handling my credit card jumped to their own conclusion. Rather than demur, I usually decided to make a fan's day. After all, I did once live through the wall from his road manager at my Weybridge, Surrey condo, and was very excited one time to see the great man's white Roller parked outside. Why not fame by association?

On one of my recent browsing safaris I came across a video curiosity that features a very young and hairy Ian Anderson near the start of his career journey.  Called the 'Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus', it features Anderson's band as first up and his now famous flute-playing position, one leg in the air.

Only last year I went to see the flute star do his jump-up pied-piper act on the Canadian leg of his Thick as a Brick world tour. Even balder than me but in better shape from skipping around the stage, Ian still gets his leg up. When I try being one-legged at yoga class I invariably topple fast.

"You are about to be transported to another age, swinging London in the late sixties" brags the VHS cover blurb. "You’ve heard of Oxford Circus, You’ve heard of Piccadilly Circus, Well this is the Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus" boasts Mick Jagger.  For that era, nearby Kings Road in Chelsea was Cool Central when I attended college right at its heart. Hard to believe we were so weird. Were did all that spontaneity go?  Don't you wish you could still leap around like that!

The Rights of The Gerontological Community

Social gerontology is an academic discipline whose day is coming. Prof Jill Quadagno, adviser to US presidents and senators, is in the right discipline to be sure of future funding and a continuing high public profile. Although it may sound odd to give a medical term a sociological slant, what the NYT calls "deteriorating conditions for retirees and older Americans in general" is giving new impetus to the movement to develop social policies that better address the issues faced by a population living longer than ever before in history.

The Gray Panthers are only a ghost of what they once were and both AARP and our Canadian version, CARP, do not make waves any more. This is hardly surprising for CARP, which is now part of Moses Znaimer's media empire and seems now to be little more than a marketing vehicle to sell services and stuff to us old'uns.  I feel a major cause of their decline in followership is that we live these days in an increasingly single-issue advocacy environment. It is one where, what Web guru Seth Godin calls 'tribes', form and reform around highly specific raw spots under the broader social umbrella.

Godin defines a tribe as a group of people, who are connected to one another, a leader and an idea. The idea around which each such tribe gels is increasingly tightly defined, e.g. raising or removing a mandatory retirement age. The wider issues of say, de facto age discrimination or the insulting portrayals of seniors widespread in advertising and the media, tend to lack leadership focus and ongoing traction. People today are not oriented on a lifetime basis to worthy causes, whether they be like Greenpeace or like the Lions, in the way of the past. We flounder with our loyalties through a sea of special issues, only sometimes stopping to help out before a new injustice catches our eye.

It is so much easier to register our objections online in places that will have little or no impact than to confront in person those whose behaviour towards us is unfair or unjust. As we have seen recently on the Maidan in Kiev, personal action is still what gets truly widespread media coverage. How we seniors, we who have reduced physical stamina and can be injured so easily, can best personally confront those who manage or personify social policies that prejudice our well-being, is still a work-in-progress. Until we figure it out, 'senior rights advocacy' remains only at a very early stage as a crusade.

There are more than enough of us caring about creating a world in which the new old have a firm place, but we are not concentrating on how best collectively to use modern tools like social media to effectively mobilize to create newsworthy action. Our tendency is to act individually by phone or in writing to object about conditions which our younger peers often feel we Boomers and pre-Boomers have little to complain about.

We are a large tribe that has no historical precedents to follow, since many people living past 65 is such a new phenomenon. It is a brand new assignment to design a world that is senior-friendly. We have made a start with the disabled. Now is the time to extend that to include the large cohort that is increasingly disadvantaged by an ever noisier, speedier, complicated and often hostile day-to-day environment.

Dying On Time

In this mid-winter shopping season, with its Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays and their ilk going right through till Boxing Day, and beyond into January Sales, many's the message from advertisers  about what will best keep our physiological furnaces at high heat and our bodies looking sprightly. We are sure to be encouraged to reflect on how we measure up against the new norms for aging vigorously; the standards set by Sir Richard Branson and other hard-charging late-life high achievers.

Those folk really do seem to have cracked the code for 'aging-with-vigour'. Some of you readers may remember the time when just 'aging-with-grace' was considered admirable?  We older folk were expected to try to keep our lips in a smile and our grousing to our peers. Folk might tell us they could see our motor was running down but we should know that is just the way things have always been. A discrete visit to a home medical equipment store might be in order, but no need to draw attention to our aches and pains. Just suffer in silence.

Nowadays we have Sixty is the New Forty in which there is no justification for behaving like the aged of times past. Cars now last longer if serviced regularly, and so should we. Pilates and hot yoga, orienteering, daily swims and workouts in the gym, spinning, and botox when needed, are all part of the new deal on saving our bodies from the curses of our years.

The problem I have with all this is my body, which seems to get creakier by the month whether I buy some of these services or not. Some sort of genetic biological clock is ticking away in me to drive my physiology to malfunction in new ways. As  drugs often exist today to prevent at least some of this deterioration from actually doing me in, I'm probably going to stay a bit longer on this planet than those before me. But neither government medicine nor today's privately-delivered healthiness enhancements can make me feel again like I did in my forties. At best they are going to make the process of my dying more prolonged, and my death itself happen somewhat later than of old.

This outcome has recently been christened 'Dying After Your Time'.  In the extra years today's gungho technology can buy us before we croak do we get any wiser? Does our life become fuller? To my mind there's little chance for that when hearing is poor, knees ache much of the time, eyesight demands large print books, and memory plays tricks. When one can't read the keys on a cellphone to transmit whatever pearls of insight come with advanced years, it is probably high time to hit the trail!

The Burden of Too Much Information

We older folks get a lot of unsolicited lifestyle advice. We are, after all, the biggest market segment in most Western countries. Among the many areas of our body that don't work quite as well as they used to are our bowels. Our parents were encouraged to keep them 'regular' by the makers of patent medicines. We are exhorted to do the same by ingesting lots of fibre by the makers of grocery products. And today's medical profession gets to weigh in by laying on us a guilt trip about submitting to an unpleasant process called a colon endoscopy, or colonoscopy for short, to check that we don't have cancer polyps.

After many years of ducking yet another invasive body intrusion I finally succumbed to my GP's pleas to try it 'just once' and booked in for one. She insisted I would henceforth be too old for another to be done. I gave in because a family pal just got diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and it's the second most frequent killer disease nowadays. In addition there is some suggestion that bowel cancer did in my grandmother (when she was 94).  As the newspaper article I link to above infers, the 'prep' is tough on an old person. The day after I still feel like I've been hit by a truck.

My test found two polyps, one of which might be cancerous, plus a diverticulitis. I know about those things, having spent years in the drug biz. I know too that my bowel is the one thing about me that seems to have always worked just fine. Now I have a couple of months to sweat till the surgeon can see me in our overstretched no-private-medicine government-funded medical monopoly.

Most old folks die of something else than a gut cancer starting at my age.  Worrying that this just might not be true for me is yet another psychic burden in an era of too much information.

Perils of Being for a Boomer

I recently got my hearing tested. No, I didn't pop down to my local WalMart's hearing aid desk. It's open to all and right by the front entrance where anyone could see me sitting there! Instead I executed a stealth sidle over to my ENT specialist (note I do have the excuse of  hay fever).  He quietly directed me to a 'hearing services' office tastefully tucked away in an obscure tower - little chance of being spotted there.

The Me Generation and Body Breakdown

Leah McLaren points out in a recent Globe & Mail piece that: “boomers have a tendency to act like they were the first generation to experience life on Earth”.  As a consequence we are both amazed and in denial at how badly our bodies are holding up. Every generation before assumed infirmity, indeed was grateful to live long enough to get it. In contrast we don’t, and aren’t.

I can’t quite recall when I was first appalled to discover I might be a ‘senior’!

Are YOU are Zoomer?

It’s hard not to come across ‘Zoomers’.If you live near Toronto there's a big show every year in Town. They are under the care of Moses Znaimer of CARP. Even if you haven’t heard of them, you probably get the idea – they are zooming into late life. For this franchise, 60 had better be the new 40!