TAKING PILLS EVERY DAY

Just some of my daily pills intake

What is the difference between youth and old age? I had been happy enough to consider myself middle-aged until a recent visit to the doctor who had given me a series of pills I had to take very day. These are statins and Metformin, tablets for diabetes, which both my mother and grandmother suffered from and so it is hardly a surprise that I have it too. Every night and morning I have to remember to take my pills.

No longer can I point out the tablets that the average male and female take over the course of a lifetime with that mixture of scorn and dismissal as I now have to take daily pills. I can no longer pty the man I overheard who had to get up every two hours in the night to pee. I have to do the same thing myself these days as my bladder is no longer strong enough to survive a night in bed without a visit to the loo. No wonder people want a private bathroom when they book a hotel room. Walking across the corridor does not seem that like a minor inconvenience when you have to do it in the middle of the night.

 

Add to the daily tablets I have to take the occasional course of antibiotics for a bladder infection and you have quite a few pills that have to be taken every day. This, I have belatedly discovered, is the real difference between youth and old age: your body is slowly but surely declining in its ability to ward off disease.

 

Leonardo di Caprio has recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, although he has not settled down to start a family yet and is still going out with younger women, these days half his age. He says that he still feels like he is thirty rather than fifty. God luck to him but sooner or later old age will catch up with him and he will have to get up in the night (if he does not do so already) and start taking the tablets to ward off the effects of old age.

What did Mark Twain say? Only two things in life are inevitable – death and taxes. There is no point in trying to avoid either of them, the first because it comes to us all and the second because sooner or later the Inland Revenue (what Americans call the IRS) will catch up with you eventually. Better to pay your share and have a good moan. Almost everyone moans about taxes because we take the result for granted but disparage the means of collection.

 

Still, I am able to work, to walk and to drive – three of the most important things to me. I rarely use the car and am certainly not going to return to driving guiding, which is simply too much hard work and expense for the reward. I often take people around on public transport and hardly ever bring the car into central London, the cost of parking and congestion charge being too high. I also get free public transport so why not take advantage of it?

 

I am blessed in finding my work enjoyable and interesting and have managed to adapt my career gradually to my aging and failing body. My mind, however, remains sharp. Although I forget names of people and words occasionally, they usually come back to me, so I have decided to continue to work until, as I said to a colleague only the other day, “I drop”. Not that I have any plans to do so anytime soon. That is one decision that is out of my hands. 

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com