On my mind

I am on vacation. During the next few weeks, this space will feature vignettes (short scenes or incidents) written mostly in the early to mid-90’s, at a time when I still entertained hopes of getting paid for writing. They are all true.

AT YOUR AGE…

She couldn’t recall her own 39th, or 40th birthday—certainly not with the degree of trauma that she’d just watched her sons face theirs. (Perhaps the trauma was only a male phenomenon?) She’d been working in her first job as a professional librarian. (She’d had the dubious distinction of being the oldest graduate in her class.)

The meager salary never seemed quite enough for the six of them, so she’d taken on a second job at Brighams (the kids actually envied her her easy access to that heavenly rich chocolate sundae topping served there).

That, together with the turbulence teen-ageism brings (four were teen-agers then; the fifth, at age 12, might just as well have been), had kept her far too busy to think of personal thresholds she herself might have been crossing.

With her two sons, though, it had been different. Not quite so bad, for the 39-year-old—he’d blithely refused to acknowledge his obviously receding hairline, blaming the gap’s visibility on an inept barber–-and on the whole he’d remained unperturbed despite the teasing of his siblings. But definitely a traumatic event for the 40-year-old. He’d set the ground rules early. No mention of age at the party. No “how old are you now?” at the end of the birthday song. No reminders of passed time, or of limits to the future. Touchy before his time, she’d thought bemusedly.

At 50, she remembered, she’d grown a little concerned. At the deepening wrinkles in her face. The hands no longer smooth, growing age spots. Naively asking her children if her age showed, if she looked any different. And she’d pulled out the few gray hairs that had begun appearing, vainly proud—as though she’d had any say in the matter—that there were so few of them compared to her younger sister, already thoroughly gray-headed.

Not until after she’d reached her 60th birthday did she really begin to feel she might be aging. Her children had wanted to make it a big occasion—urged her to come visit so they could mount a massive family celebration. But she had demurred. “Why all the fuss?” she’d asked. Both her aunt and her step-mother had lived to celebrate their 75th birthday. In comparison, she was a “spring chicken,” she’d told them. She had, it is true, now lived longer than either of her parents. The thought made her uncomfortable, though she wasn’t sure why. Without them, she realized, she had no models of how a 60-year-old was supposed to behave, what was expected of one that old. Her friends were no help—they were all far younger. It also made her feel mortal.

Unexpectedly, her eyesight had begun to improve. She stopped wearing her tri-focals, except to read. That did make her feel younger—until she discovered the change was due to an incipient cataract in one eye. The cataract, her opthalmologist had told her, had “cured” her astigmatism, enabling her to see more clearly than before. “That often happens at your age, but it won’t last,” the doctor had warned. “Don’t wait a year for your next check-up. That cataract is bound to grow. You should come back every three months to have it looked at again.”

Her medical doctor also began to badger her. “At your age,” he’d start out. He wanted her to have a complete physical. She was already getting a mammogram each year. And a pap smear when she thought of it. Due in large part to her continued smoking, she’d had more chest x-rays than she cared to remember. With all that, she didn’t need a physical, she’d protested.

She was nearly as active as she’d always been, she’d reassured herself. Still went scuba-diving—admittedly less often than in years past, but that was the fault of the dive leader, who’d taken to catering to tourists rather than local dive aficionados. She had continued to dive on the yearly vacations with her sons, though. And she still went beachcombing, though again not quite so often. There were more people on the beaches now, and the pickings had declined accordingly. Had only gained about eight pounds since her twenties—though her shape sure wasn’t the same. But she had taken up exercising on a fairly regular basis, now that she had acquired a TV and found an exercise program she liked.

The next time he saw her the doctor asked, “But what about hormones? You should be taking them at your age.” She’d looked askance. She’d gone through menopause years ago, and no one had ever suggested hormonal treatment in all the intervening years. What did she need hormones for now? She felt fine. Besides, her father had been a doctor, and she’d learned from him to distrust over-medication. She remembered his diatribes against neurotic pill-taking matrons, his irritation with patients who put their faith in vitamin pills. “It’s better to eat the right foods,” he’d told her.

So she sometimes sweated at seemingly irrelevant times—when it wasn’t all that hot. But she lived in the tropics, and who could say whether the sweats were “hot flashes” or due to the climate. The young doctor, however, was very persuasive, so, begrudgingly, she had the prescriptions filled, and took the bottles of pills home with her, still not convinced she really needed them.

Being skeptical, she made it a point to read every word of the fine print on the little folded-up pieces of paper that came with the hormones, and was not reassured. Of course, one expressed its cautions in terms of pregnant women and nursing mothers. That didn’t apply to her at all. But the other warned of carcinogenic risks, so she let the pills sit on the table, but didn’t take them. Eventually, she threw them out. “Well, taking those hormones?” the doctor had asked the next time he saw her. “No,” she replied, pointing out to him the printed warnings she’d brought with her in anticipation of his questions. Like a used car salesman, he urged her once more to take the hormones. “Studies show that they do decrease the incidence of heart attacks in people you age,” he told her again. So he wrote her another prescription, and she again stood in line to have it filled. This time she did take the pills for a week, but when she started getting stomach cramps, she stopped. She knew the cramps could just as easily have come from bad drinking water, but she had neither the patience nor the inclination to go through the trouble of finding out.

He also insisted on her taking stool samples and bringing them in for a reading. He’d given her the envelopes a year earlier, but she’d ignored them, never followed through. She’d never had to do that before either.

Why should she do it now? “Well, at your age…” he’d said, looking at her intently. So she accepted new envelopes, brought them back in for testing. And had felt reassured when he told her they were normal. She’d thought they would be. After all, her body hadn’t been giving her any trouble in that regard.

But he did not let it rest there. “You should get your cholesterol checked. And we should do a flexible sigmoidoscopy too,” he continued relentlessly. Stubbornly, she fought off both recommendations—the persistent, intrusive reminders that she could no longer rely on her body to serve her as a matter of course, that implacable statistics were now turning against her, that there might be truth to the adage that prudence was the better part of valor.

But then she learned that a friend, nearly her own age, had been struck with a particularly unpleasant type of cancer, and she became a little less sure of herself. Disturbed enough to allow herself to be subjected to the indignity and discomfort of having a lighted tube poked along her colon to search for irregularities. She hadn’t actually been able to give a lot of attention to the possibility that abnormalities might have been found—she’d been far too obsessed by the prior preparation process: two enemas, half an hour apart, and no less than half an hour before her appointment. But she was again in luck. There were no irregularities. Still suffused with relief that the ordeal was finally over, she heard the doctor say, “You’ll have to do this again in a year, and then every three to five years, you know.”

Numbly, she allowed a blood sample to be taken, for the cholesterol count. Was this what getting older was all about? What it meant to turn 60? A growing preoccupation with potential failure of the body? An unending series of tests and check-ups and unpleasant examinations? Enslavement to daily medications? Reliance on man-made artificial chemicals for continued health?

Or was she the hapless victim of an over-zealous young physician, still too inculcated with the ethos of preventive medicine to have learned to temper it with wisdom and compassion?

She didn’t know. What she did know was that she didn’t like the burden it left her with for turning 60.

(The writer is a librarian by profession, and a long-term resident of the CNMI. To contact her, send e-mail to ruth.tighe@saipan.com.)