What Makes Me Sick
When you get past sixty, health suddenly becomes a big issue regardless of your state of repair. It all makes sense and you don’t need a big imagination to figure out why. For the longest time when I was young I thought I would be lucky to make sixty. Now, at sixty-five I have a greatly revised point of view, but probably not for the reasons you suspect.
I have always been big. Let’s just say that I am alone in my vastness. My size is my personal albatross. I’m not just big, I’m BIG. When I was 8, they thought I was 12. When I was 14 the orthopedist told me not to play tennis until my tendons caught up with my size. When I was 16 I stopped fitting into off-the-rack sizes. I started college at 310 pounds and was immediately recruited to join the football team.
As an adult I can’t begin to recount the issues I’ve had to deal with because of my size. Now before I go too far with this issue, let me remind you that men have a much easier time dealing with bigness since scale is generally an advantage in male pursuits. Tall men have an even easier time in general because one looks less like a ball and more like a giant. It’s not so awful for a man to look like an out of shape lineman. Women, I’m certain, will agree that the world is not fair on this issue. So it could have been worse.
It helps that I am reasonably athletic (or at least once was), have a full head of hair (I finally have a forehead), and am blessed with a good sense of humor. Still, my size does startle some, scares others, and generally overshadows my persona on a first impression basis at least. To put it bluntly, my size is the single most significant aspect of my being that has determined my life’s course. This said, I recall a friend once telling me that he admired me for not letting my size stop me from doing most of the physical things other men do. And again, once a man at my gym saying to me in the spa that it was great to see a big man like me moving so well and enjoying physical activity (in this case swimming).
The jobs I took in college, the girls I dared to ask out, the cars I bought and the clothes I would wear. If clothes make the man, then size picks the clothes that make the man. I guess we are all creatures of our environment, but few characteristics do more to determine character than size. We’ve all heard about Napoleon complexes. Undoubtedly you’ve all known a small person who has compensated with other forms of success. But what of big men? They are not much sympathized with. Big men are considered well able to take care of themselves, thank you very much. They are truly alone in their vastness.
But in life there is always payback, and the payback for size is that big dogs don’t live as long. It’s just a fact of life. That was the fact of life I understood when I was young. I tried to address the issue every way imaginable from Weight Watchers to St, Luke’s, from Pritikin to Duke and nothing really took until I had bariatric surgery thirteen years ago. With that I managed to lose enough weight to keep myself active and reasonably fit ever since.
Two years ago I buried my mother, who lived to the age of 100. She never had diabetes, she never had coronary or pulmonary issues, and she never had cancer. Towards the end she had a touch of senile dementia, but hey, who doesn’t. The point is, she outlived all her siblings, who lived to age 89. I suspect she outlived them all because of her years living in and traveling in the emerging countries of the world, where what doesn’t kill you truly makes you stronger. She ate enough exotic dirt to push the bounds of her immune system to new heights (eleven years worth to be exact). I lived six years with her in those places as a child and then traveled them as an adult. I have no empirical evidence that it did for my immune system what it did for hers, but I would bet it did.
About twenty years ago I started to notice some things when I went to the doctor. Specifically when I went to Duke University for a month of weight loss therapy. One day, as I glanced through a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, I was surprised to see an ad for Duke Diet & Fitness Center. I had heard good things about the Duke program for years. I liked that it had a great success rate. I had also heard that they specialize in serious weight problems. I was beginning to realize that my problem was indeed serious. I decided then and there to go. Duke takes this all very seriously, especially the medical part. There were lots of fellow inmates with serious medical conditions. We were all assigned our own GP and, of course, I got the 105 pound female physician who was certain she would find scads of things wrong with me at 44 years old.
When all the regular test results yielded nothing out of line, she ordered up a batch of advanced tests. I had a Thallium Stress Test, I went to a dermatologist to check out moles, I had a hepatabiliary scan for advanced liver function. She found nothing and I sensed she was decidedly not happy to come up with nothing. But I left Duke after a month a fair bit lighter and with a clean bill of health.
My GP for many years was cut from the same bolt of cloth as my Duke GP. She sent me for test after test, from echocardiograms to every variety of stress test. Nothing. She was, in fact, the doctor who pushed me into bariatric surgery, only to leave her practice before I had racked up the 120 pound loss I have managed to keep off ever since. When she left I inherited a pleasant Irish GP who spent the next ten years coming to the casual realization that there was nothing wrong with me except the occasional ingrown toenail or stray mole to remove for aesthetic reasons.
When it was recently time for my Irish GP to move on to greener pastures, he sat me down and gave me this speech. “We know you aren’t going to die of a heart problem. We know your blood sugar is low and you won’t get diabetes. Your PSA is low and you have no family history of cancer, so that’s unlikely to be an issue for you. But, now let’s talk about your joints. I still want you to lose weight just for the sake of your joints, OK?”
Not a bad or unreasonable diagnosis I would say. It annoys everyone in my family that whatever ills they suffer, I don’t seem to get. I’ve been sleeping with a CPAP machine and have done so for twenty-five years, but I sleep well. I’ve never had a root canal and get told by my dentists that they’re surprised I don’t have more plaque. They assume I floss daily, but I don’t. I recently went to the ophthalmologist (an old college friend) and was told that I am now 20-25 and legal to drive in New York State without corrective lenses. That, after a lifetime of wearing glasses. I’m told some correction is normal, just not that much.
Who knows why, but I seem to have very little that makes me sick. I almost hate to jinx my good luck by talking about it, because we all know what happens as soon as you say something like that. I have changed from thinking that three score twenty would be a great bargain for a lifespan, but given that that’s only five years away, I’ve honestly started worrying more about living too long. I watched my mother outlive those she cared about (other than her children) and saw it was no fun.
I also find that the older I get, the slower I am moving. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a limit to how much someone can slow down. My son once asked if I could ever run. I don’t want my grandson asking me if I could ever walk. I think my Irish GP had it right. I may not get felled by the big three (knock on wood), but that’s not all there is to worry about. What makes me sick is worrying about staying active and that’s a pretty reasonable thing to worry about.
Dear Not Alone Dieter,
I started the weight issue from the other side. I was 6’1” and weighed 146 lbs. when I got married at 22 (yikes). This was many years before I had two discs removed and I became 6’. I disliked being too skinny but I played soccer, tennis and a lot of frisbee so I was enjoying being active. The cafeteria food might’ve been another source of keeping my weight down. At least once a week we had something we called ‘mystery meat’. Was that common at all college cafeterias?
We were now wed and had our own apartment and in that apartment we had our own refrigerator ! For the first time in our lives we didn’t have to ask for permission to raid the ‘fridge’. But I worked a very physical job and later had my own store that required a lot of physical activity. Yet, over 17 years I was up to about 180-185. That’s when I severely hurt my back and have had nerve damage ever since. Mainly in my legs. That slowed me down and I’ve put on weight ever since. A couple of years ago I decided to do something about it and bicycled my behind off (one of the few things that is least bothersome to my back) and was successful in losing about 30 lbs.. Then I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, had it removed and I had to curtail things for awhile. Hello to a few of those lost pounds. But within two months I was back in the saddle……for a couple of months. A tiny bit of the cancer had gotten out to part of a lymph node and I consulted at the Moffit cancer center in Tampa. It’s one of the best cancer centers in the country and they suggested I have some radiation treatments to play it safe(r). Some meant 40. They didn’t hurt but there was a couple of things I had to do each day to prep and then 40+ annoying drives in and out of Tampa. Luckily in the middle of the day at least and not rush hour.
Here’s the problem. I am a creature of habit and I am not a happy camper when my schedule gets messed up. I like to get into my routine because I know myself and know I will stick with it. Any protracted disruption wrecks my mind set and also gives me excuses to be lazy. The present disruption is the renovations, as you know, which will end in two weeks after two and a half months. THEN it’s off to the races and my poor lonely bicycle will feel useful again. I promise ! No more bumps in the road ahead.
You may have thought that was the end of this reply. But no! You’re in luck! I did not know that you went to the Duke weight loss center. I am familiar with it for a few reasons though none about my weight. When I was at Duke the big deal in the center was the ‘Rice Diet’. It was started in the mid nineteen forty’s and became so popular that Durham became a mecca for the obese. It called itself the ‘diet capital of the world’. Many famous people went there.
One night I was watching Johnny Carson and Buddy Hacket was on. Johnny spoke of Buddy just having done the diet and asked him how it was. Buddy said it was a wonderful but if you didn’t eat the thermometer in the morning you got nothing to eat all day! He also said place had wonderful, great, caring doctors and nurses. Well one of the nurses was my second oldest sister, Barbara, who hade gotten her nursing degree at Duke. She met her husband there when he was finishing med school. I’m not sure how many people would remember this but at that time all doctors HAD to serve two years in the military upon graduation. So while he was (fortunately) serving in Korea , she worked at the Duke hospital. So I asked her had she met him? At this juncture I should mention that Bobbi was very, very pretty. So she answered my question with “OH YEAH !! “ She told how he would chase the nurses, mainly her, up and down the halls trying to grab them. He was a handful and all the nurses tried to avoid getting his attention. She survived and could laugh about her telling him she was married and how totally ineffective it was as a deterrent.
I will add this as a personal note. She died 23 years ago and I miss her greatly. She was eight years older but on some sort of cosmic level or such we were close. Never geographically speaking but kindred spirits on the inside. Another nurse and friend of hers died the same year. They had been admired and cared about by the rest of their class enough for the classmates going and getting permission to put a memorial for them in the Duke gardens that are right on the main campus and beside the hospital. So Bobbi, I’m not the only one who misses you.
Sincerely, Barbara Lundholm’s Younger Brother