Birthday Organ Recital

Happy 69!

Whoopee!

Yeah right...

My friend who has been working his way back from his aneurysm/stroke told me about another colleague, a little older than both of us, who came up with an interesting name for the conversation that men of his/our age have maybe more often than we'd admit to.

He called it the "organ recital." You know, prostate, kidneys, hips, knees, eyes, brain, and (yep) pecker. Was it Shaw who said "youth is wasted on the young?" You have to start dealing with this stuff to start appreciating what it was like to not have to deal with it. This is not to diminish the experience of people I know in their thirties and forties who are dealing with limiting experiences like MS or the kind of diabetes that has to be carefully managed.

It's not all bad. Thanks to a cataract that was probably occluding 80% of my vision in one eye--amazing how we compensate, I hadn't noticed--I now have a new lens in that eye that corrects the astigmatism that it had as well. I can drive and watch a movie without glasses. I hear that hip and knee replacements offer similar improvements.

Alas, Viagra and Cialis do not effectively substitute for the libido of a seventeen year-old, but I'm not sure I mind. Being less focused on that organ has benefits for even those times when you are using it. I may not be the man I was, but I suspect I can be a better lover.

The one thing I find most annoying is how seldom I sleep through the night. Yes, I know, there are medications, but have you paid attention to the side-effects lists? Turns out that by choosing to stop taking Flomax, a medication often prescribed after treatment for prostate cancer, I may have made my lens replacement in that eye possible. Flowmax apparently effects the same kind of muscle tissue that is in the eye and would have made the kind of lens replacement I had much more difficult. So I'm not about to take something daily for the rest of my life "that should not be handled by women, especially women who are pregnant." The bathroom is only about ten steps away. I'm getting good at managing it while only waking up halfway.

I'm also not fond of what has happened to my metabolism. I spent most of my adulthood with a 32 inch waist at 170 to 175 pounds. I did not routinely exercise, though I was active, and I enjoyed cooking and eating. Without changing much of anything I bumped up ten pounds or so in the early nineties, and then added 25 in the last decade leaving me around 215 with a 40 inch waist. Not a figure to feel good about. We work out three mornings a week, but it takes fairly ruthless dieting to get it down to 205. Since I am the cook I am looking at ways to drop the input while keeping the flavor up enough to avoid the always hungry feeling. but I really don't want to make my life about not eating food.


But what we do know is that the clock will not get turned back.