The Age-Related Falling Apart Thread

Started by SueC, June 25, 2020, 03:32:34

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SueC

Dear fellow denizens travelling from cradle to grave

...and perhaps closer to t'one than t'other...

I don't know if all of us need a thread like this yet, but some of us will...  :1f62a:

Anyway, this is where you can bring your new malfunctions/equipment failures/ailments/afflictions/additional weather forecasting capabilities, and tales of young whippersnappers who don't respect their elders and betters and whatever they listen to, it's clearly not music... :angel

...and get a sympathetic ear and perhaps a collection of other people's miseries that make you feel better about your own (...is that all? ...you don't know how well off you are!).

After all, did not a wise man once say, "The fire's nearly out, and there's nothing left to burn..." (when he was only bloody well 39, for heaven's sake  :evil:  - oh to be 39 again grumble grumble)...  :angel

Catalogue your woes here.

I'll be brave and jump into this murky pool first.

I could go on and on about loss of skin elasticity and the cumulative effects of gravity on mammary glands and other non-essential and essential parts of the anatomy, about getting one's hair colour from a bottle, about having to work harder on one's fitness than ten years ago, about the ever more challenging micromanagement of adipose deposits around the umbilicus, about not walking normally anymore when first getting out of bed in the morning but sort of creaking crabwise in a huddled manner in the general direction of the bathroom, about having your sex hormones being made by big pharma rather than your own gonads and wondering what would happen to that aspect of your life were you to get stranded on a desert island, about periodically not being able to stand straight for a couple of days without doing ten minutes of Pilates first just because you overdid something or moved the wrong way, about finding that one of your toe joints now dislocates and snaps back in a painful manner when you put pressure on your toe from a particular direction in the relatively normal course of movement, about being horrified by grating sounds when you turn your head from side to side, about suddenly needing reading glasses to be able to decipher your beloved books, about the horror of then looking at yourself through those reading glasses and realising that failing vision gave you an airbrushed view of yourself for a while now, about all sorts of stuff like that...  :beaming-face

...but I won't.  Instead, I'm just going to present my latest never-before-experienced piece of personal corporeal disintegration:  Pain in the bases of the thumbs after a week of cutting and dragging the old wood out of fodder hedges, which I hope is a soft tissue injury and not arthritis (because then at least it's got a decent chance of healing up uneventfully).

And I'm also going to mention my husband's most recent ridiculous foray into this territory:  Taking his lunch bag off the rear seat of the car from the driver's seat, and then not being able to use his shoulder properly for over three months.

My friend Alice, who's in her 80s, calls this game, "What fresh horror is this?"

Come ye and play.  :winking_tongue
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

It might not have just do with age, but being 50+ it probably has: I feel sooo tired sometimes, especially after 1-2 hours of garden work...  :unamused:
And my neck and the knees (etc.) sometimes do hurt...
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Gardening has always had that effect on me.  It only became interesting when a) I could eat it, or b) it was wildlife-friendly.  This part is probably not your age, just the effect of a strange combination of dullness, hard work and fresh air!   :winking_tongue   ...and that's why I love podcasts...

The knees, however...  :1f635:

By the way, check your Vitamin D levels - a lot of people have borderline deficiencies and can benefit from supplementation, especially through the winter when you're not exposing skin to sunlight much... that can make you tired... and leave you prone to infections too...they're just investigating the link with COVID-19 severity...
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on June 26, 2020, 14:39:32Gardening has always had that effect on me.

Well then I won't worry.  :happy

Quote from: SueC on June 26, 2020, 14:39:32By the way, check your Vitamin D levels - a lot of people have borderline deficiencies and can benefit from supplementation...

Yeah, I've been out in the sun (rather too often than not).
Someone once gave me some Vitamin D pills, after I read the package insert, I discarded them...
(Same as with some other supplementation pills years ago; I didn't feel too well after taking them, so why bother...?)

My tiredness might come from more garden work than usual (when I had more "normal" work I just didn't have the time). Hangin' around waiting for work or a positive sign, probably added to it... :unamused:
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Quote from: Ulrich on June 26, 2020, 18:21:32
Quote from: SueC on June 26, 2020, 14:39:32Gardening has always had that effect on me.

Well then I won't worry.  :happy

Another good soporific is watching the paint dry.  :angel


Quote from: Ulrich on June 26, 2020, 18:21:32Yeah, I've been out in the sun (rather too often than not).
Someone once gave me some Vitamin D pills, after I read the package insert, I discarded them...
(Same as with some other supplementation pills years ago; I didn't feel too well after taking them, so why bother...?)

As it's summer and you're getting regular outdoors time and presumably not wearing a bag over your head, yeah, you should be OK for Vitamin D at the moment.  But would you believe many Australians are borderline deficient now because our anti-skincancer campaign is a bit too effective?

If something doesn't agree with you, then it's a good idea not to do it.  A lot of supplementation is actually unnecessary if you eat healthily, and much stuff is quackery.  But I was one of the borderline Vitamin D deficiency people at one point, despite being outdoors a fair bit, so it was helpful for me, and especially later, when I had a broken bone.

I wonder how common borderline or actual Vitamin D deficiency is in Goths compared to the normal population.  :angel  ...also shift workers and virtual cave dwellers...


Quote from: Ulrich on June 26, 2020, 18:21:32My tiredness might come from more garden work than usual (when I had more "normal" work I just didn't have the time). Hangin' around waiting for work or a positive sign, probably added to it... :unamused:

Carrying the weight of the world on one's shoulders can make a person tired as well, and there's a bit of that at the moment.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

I think it's time to broach the subject of middle-aged breasts. I'm not going to comment on male breasts, but I will say that there comes a time where you need a crane to get the female ones back to where they were 20 years earlier. That's when you get really thankful for the invention of the bra, which hoists things back into an undisturbing position and stops you from having to wear them around your ankles eventually.  :P

Of course, your breasts are always over a decade younger than you.  :angel
SueC is time travelling

Ms_Mephistopheles

Hmm, I'm two weeks shy of my 42nd trip around the sun, so it's early days in the "what fresh hell is this?" game, but there are signs: I have to turn music down to "see" where I am going, I have started to argue with the radio, and I have what my youngest niece charmingly refers to as my "daisy patch" but is actually the signs of white hair cropping in an alarmingly Cruella DeVille way on one side (so I am dyeing those bastards - it can go white in unison,  or f--k off!) I am also becoming alarmingly dependant on my glasses for close-up work.

Oh, I know I've got it all to play for yet! My grandmother tells me this :D but it's very sobering to go from taking everything for granted, to having the fact that none of us are bloody immortal thrown into sharp focus (or not, as the glasses situation clearly attests) Lockdowns here in the UK nipped my love of walking in the bud, and though I've been on my feet all day at work throughout the pandemic, I've been stressed and slovenly with what I eat, and to my horror I've gone from being one of those smug low blood pressure types to having sky high blood pressure that I am being medicated for now. This is the most shocking change and has really dented my confidence.

Ho hum. One upside though is that "sensible shoes" in my mind are Dr. Martens so I have been re-embracing my teenage collection! :D

SueC

Quote from: Ms_Mephistopheles on October 16, 2021, 15:30:36I have what my youngest niece charmingly refers to as my "daisy patch" but is actually the signs of white hair cropping in an alarmingly Cruella DeVille way on one side (so I am dyeing those bastards - it can go white in unison,  or f--k off!)

Hear, hear! ...wait till you have to start making decisions like this for downstairs. Nobody ever wants to talk about this, but I remain, as ever, your humble servant etc. It's kind of an extrapolation from when you start to include your eyebrows when you do your upstairs so as to avoid obvious parts mismatch. Of course, with advancing decrepitude, down the track, restorative hair colouring anywhere will itself start to look like parts mismatch, and then it will be back to the drawing board, with either more bohemian colourings all around, or going native.

It is strongly rumoured that some younger women (and maybe men too, who knows) avoid any of this by tearing all their downstairs hair out, which strikes me as an unbelievably masochistic pursuit for one thing, and as voluntary infantilisation for another, and both of these are anathema to me. Since I don't do pornography (except the capital-P album) I have never seen any actual evidence for this rumour myself, and can remain to some extent in blessed ignorance on this point.

When I was in my late teens I had an Epilady, which was supposed to give you hair-free legs but which instead gave you pain, ingrown hairs and broken capillaries. The pain was not of the constant continuous kind, which would have been more bearable, one can just brace oneself - but this machine was quite slow and inefficient, and would growl a lot before tearing out whole clumps of hair at random intervals. You'd be sweating in white-knuckled anticipation of its next assault. I gave the machine away to a person with a less developed nervous system and tougher capillaries, and made friends with razors.


Quote from: Ms_Mephistopheles on October 16, 2021, 15:30:36I am also becoming alarmingly dependant on my glasses for close-up work.

We've had reading glasses for three years, and should probably have had them three years earlier, but we were in some form of subconscious denial, and just continued for a number of years to increase the brightness of our bedside lamps while holding our books further and further away, and then rubbing our eyes 20 minutes later complaining about the sandman. Eventually I realised I couldn't handwrite anymore sitting down, and see what I was actually writing - adding things to the shopping list standing up had not disclosed any problems, and neither had writing to a screen (that came later).

So one year we couldn't read our Christmas presents, and resolved to go to town to get reading glasses the moment things opened up again after New Year. We came home with them, and about two minutes later I heard my husband exclaiming from the kitchen, "Sue! It's amazing! Come look at this! The detail is just incredible!"

He was looking, of all things, at the knobs on the cooker. The next half hour was like what happens when you give a magnifying glass to a first-grader - a visual treasure-hunt all over the house. Then we settled down to read our Christmas presents, marvelling at the clarity of the print and the complete lack of eye strain. Oooh! Aaah!

These days I have to decide if I want to actually see my food when I'm eating, or not. On balance, I do - as food also has aesthetic appeal and I don't like eating blurs. Sometimes, if I don't have my glasses nearby, I will look at my husband's food while eating my own. He sits opposite me and the contents of our plates are usually near-identical.


Quote from: Ms_Mephistopheles on October 16, 2021, 15:30:36...it's very sobering to go from taking everything for granted, to having the fact that none of us are bloody immortal thrown into sharp focus (or not, as the glasses situation clearly attests)

ROFL.  :lol:

Yeah, but I'm also ecstatic to be living in an age when there's lots of solutions to the various age-related malfunctions. You can get various magnification reading glasses for the price of a kilogram of cheddar each, and they do a marvellous job (the glasses, and the cheddar). We have dentists to save us from pain and tooth loss that would otherwise inevitably happen. We discovered hiking poles and use one each (we might upgrade to two eventually) when going down steep mountainside trails, because we realise this will really save our knees and extend our pain-free mountain-walking lives, so we can eventually be like the wonderful 60-80-year-old people we meet on trails, instead of the 60-80-year-olds sitting at home.

I see 40+ as a bonus. I'd have been dead for decades already as a cavewoman. Life is more enjoyable now than it was earlier in my life span, and there's so much stuff I'm still getting better at - and so many intricate things I do that are mostly autopilot and I don't even have to think about, like whizzing up some hazelnut scrolls, or turning cheddar into Welsh Rarebit. My 40s were the best decade of my life so far. I can't comment on anything further down the track yet.


Quote from: Ms_Mephistopheles on October 16, 2021, 15:30:36Lockdowns here in the UK nipped my love of walking in the bud, and though I've been on my feet all day at work throughout the pandemic, I've been stressed and slovenly with what I eat, and to my horror I've gone from being one of those smug low blood pressure types to having sky high blood pressure that I am being medicated for now. This is the most shocking change and has really dented my confidence.

I hope you get your walking and your me-time back. A lot of stuff like this is actually very reversible, if you can get back to your regular walking and better eating before too many years go by. Things will repair themselves to an amazing degree if you give your body the building blocks, and enough sleep and exercise, and time to heal up without continuing to subject it to the same thing that caused whatever problem in the first place.

The problem can be lack of energy. If that happens, sometimes you just have to rest aggressively for a week or two before you get back to extended exercise - and enjoy your rest, instead of feeling guilty about not doing the miles right now. So far, for us, resting up a week or two, or maybe just for a weekend, after "going flat" has always resulted in getting our energy back and wanting to do serious miles again.


Quote from: Ms_Mephistopheles on October 16, 2021, 15:30:36Ho hum. One upside though is that "sensible shoes" in my mind are Dr. Martens so I have been re-embracing my teenage collection! :D

That is a very good upside! I broke my foot three years ago, and discovered that hiking boots aren't just good for hiking, and are a good match for general hippie clothes. By the way, my triple fracture was healed to weight-bearing in under six weeks, which would have been fast even for an 18-25-year-old (foot fractures can take upwards of 12 weeks to heal), but then my bone density for my half-century scan recently worked out at one standard deviation above the average 18-25-year-old, which had my GP beaming like a lighthouse (but the average 18-25-year-old these days is a couch potato).


Sensible footwear, but not playing lawn bowls

Of course, bone healing is dependent on good nutrition, rest and continuing to exercise, so I was on a pirate leg outdoors for six weeks, instead of crutches, so I could still walk of sorts and then only have to rehabilitate below the knee afterwards, and I didn't develop the wrist and shoulder issues people on crutches for extended periods of time are prone to. If I hadn't done stuff like that, but gone "standard", healing up would have taken much longer...

Sometimes people will put down to age what is really down to lifestyle...and understanding that is your best friend 40+.  :)


Even our dog has caught up with us and is now middle-aged, but we're all still having fun.
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