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I must be getting old or at least my body wants my mind to make me think so. In my mind I am still 30 years old. I guess it’s my Peter Pan mindset that I have had since that age. But as the years progress, my body has slowly been eroding that concept. No matter how much I don’t want to grow up I can’t fight the aging process.
I wish I could say that I was as invincible as I thought I was in my youth, but alas, those days have long gone, at least as far as my body’s concerned. My mind still thinks that I can burn the candle at both ends but once I’ve gotten to the middle my body reminds me that I have just gotten burned. The years of neglect and abuse to my “temple” have not made this transition easier. But if you play, eventually you’ve got to pay. Even though there may be a price, the journey was definitely worth taking. So the best I can do is make the best use of the herbal and medical technology available.
This is not to say that I am sick or dying by any means, quite the contrary. All things considered, I am as healthy as can be expected for an overweight man who is nearing, well let’s not put a number to it. It’s just that I find little aches and pains keep popping up every now and then where there were none before.
I guess most guys my age would call them an old “football” injury although most of them, just like me, never played football. If you have to give it a name it would really be “age” but any name will do regardless of its origin. Glory days in our memories will always be glorious no matter what you were doing at the time.
So as time marches on, and the ravages to my vessel continue, a different set of priorities come to the forefront. You try walking a little more than driving, you actually think about the “E” word (exercise), think about eating healthier foods, and taking vitamins on a regular basis. Whether or not we act on any of those or not is subject to each individual, but at least we are thinking about them.
But even if you are doing all of those things those little aches and sudden pains will still sneak up on you. They are like a little surprise party that you don’t want. I don’t know about you but I look at whatever part of me is being attacked like “Where the hell did that come from?” In my youth, when I experienced pains like that, I knew why. OK I banged my knee into the door, that’s why my knee hurts. But when I am sitting watching TV and out of the blue I get a sharp pain in my knee that comes and goes I sit there bewildered. It’s like a little group of terrorists inside of your body that decides to attack a region then retreat. What is even weirder is when it doesn’t happen again for months, years, or sometimes never again.
When it doesn’t go away that’s even a bigger problem, even if you can afford insurance. The continuing escalation of the cost to insure yourself or your family has become absolutely ridiculous. The only way to make it affordable on a monthly or a yearly basis is to make concessions somewhere along the way, like in deductibles or in prescriptions.
We did get a glimmer of hope recently with the Governator proposing that help could be coming from the state on the insurance front. Wow, how very Democratic of him. Who knows how long that will take to happen or if it will ever take. Plus he didn’t mention anything about prescriptions, which is a problem for all of us, but even more so for our senior citizens.
So much so that growing numbers of our senior citizens are making the trip across the border to buy more reasonably priced medications. Some to Mexico, but most to that vacation wonderland to the North, Canada. It has long been known that Canada has prescription medications that they can afford and this fact has not been lost on our senior citizens.
Personally, I think Canada is missing the boat as far as tourist dollars go. I jokingly referred to them as a vacation wonderland, but there may actually be something to that. They should put together tour packages for senior citizens so they can go on vacation and pick up prescriptions at the same time. I mean seniors for years now have been putting together bus excursions to go across the border for the day, hell why not make a weekend of it?
They could build giant Pharmaceutical Resorts that not only have restaurants, theaters, and spas, but an assortment of pharmacies. Think of Branson Missouri on legal drugs. With the money the Americans would be saving on their drugs it would probably pay for their vacation
Hopefully in a couple of decades from now, when my aches and pains have reached the point where they require the types of medications our seniors use now, our country will finally have a health plan that covers all citizens like Canada does.
While Canada is a beautiful place, I really don’t want to spend my vacations during my golden years at a Pharmaceutical Resort.
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