Old woman

I heard from Marie a couple days ago. She had a painful rash on her face, and finally one of her friends prevailed upon her to go to the doctor and have it checked.

She has shingles.

Since it was on her face, they were concerned that it not get too near her eyes, because if the shingles virus infects the eyes it can lead to blindness. (Or I think that's what she said. I'm not a doctor and might have gotten it wrong.) So they made sure to check out her eyes.

She has cataracts.

Not badly enough to plan for surgery yet, but badly enough that the doctor said she might have trouble driving at night because she couldn't see well enough. She confirmed for me that she hates driving at night these days.

Also she has bad knees. She's considering knee replacement surgery. 

Have I written about her knees before? It seems to me like I should have, but when I search the blog I can't find any mention. She messed up her knees in an accident years ago—not long after college, in fact. They gave her physical therapy exercises to strengthen them again, but what with one thing and another she stopped doing them. Even so, when I got back together with her in 2016 we could still go hiking—maybe not the kind of hiking I do with Debbie (which sometimes leaves me huffing and puffing), but gentle hiking at any rate. When we got together this summer at her family's summer cottage, I was frankly alarmed at how her ability to walk had deteriorated. I asked her please—please!—to work on strengthening her knees. I don't want to say it in so many words, but in the back of my mind I fear that if she's declined this far in (what has it been?) six years—why, in another six years she may be confined to a wheelchair. (God forbid.) It was that bad.

Anyway, the upshot is that Marie currently suffers from:

Shingles.

Cataracts.

And bad knees.

I talked with her this evening on the phone and she said, a little sardonically, "In case you hadn't noticed, your girlfriend is getting old." 

I'd noticed. 

It scares me.

Not so much for me, to be clear, but for her. I don't want her constrained by the limitations that come with all these diagnoses. I know that they are all treatable, but—shit!—what a pain to have to take time out to treat them. 

Meanwhile I'm aware that my own health isn't perfect. But in my case my worry is still that I eat or drink too much. It's a different kind of worry. And at that, I weigh less than I did a year ago. Also just today I got a call from my doctor to tell me that both my cholesterol and my triglycerides are about where they are supposed to be. (For the last couple of years, one or the other has regularly been out of bounds.) So if I actually pay attention and eat right (which I didn't do today, but I did in the month leading up to the test) I can keep my body chemistry more or less in balance without medication. That's good to know. If I did it once, I should be able to do it again.

In a way, I suppose this post is a companion piece to this post here, dated nine years ago. Ironically, when Marie and I spent a week at the summer cottage back in July, my erections were more reliable than they have been in years. We fucked several times, and it wasn't all finger-work. Marie and I have had plenty of other visits that didn't turn out so well. I have no idea what caused the change, but I'm sure not complaining.

We all get old. Unless we die young, of course, but that's no fun either. But I'm particularly aware of it right about now.