Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Too Young to be Old
One of the (myriad) reasons why I dread getting older, and why my next birthday, which begins with a THREE and ends with a ZERO holds such terror for me, is because I regularly get a sneak preview of what aging will feel like. I’ve had back problems since I was in junior high school… one day something riiiiiiiipped back there, and periodically ever since, my back just gets hurty. Usually, when someone asks, I just say “Oh, I hurt my back.” But today, when someone asked, I called it “Chronic Back Pain.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth I could have clawed my own eyes out… because I had become one of those people with “Chronic Back Pain.” The man I told this to was in his sixties, and he had far too much sympathy in his face. I felt like an old lady, complaining about her sciatica… when in fact I was a young lady, complaining about her sciatica. The point being, that young people shouldn’t complain about sciatica at all.
I am young. I’m older than I’ve ever been, admittedly, but there’s no help for that. Back when life expectancies topped out at 60, I would be middle aged. I’m almost the same age as my mother was when she had me. My problem is and always has been my weight. I could be one of those people who make a life change through the miracle of Yoga or phen phen or Subway and run marathons until I’m 92… but I doubt it; so I’m faced with the very real and very frightening possibility that I was my healthiest back in college, and it’s straight downhill from here.
Perhaps these incipient health problems wouldn’t feel so insurmountable if I had access to healthcare. Were I to wake up tomorrow without feeling in my legs, I would be forced to weigh the possibility of not walking against the price of an emergency room visit. Physical ruin versus financial ruin is an ugly choice. Already I know that my dental health has been compromised by my poverty. Once, I sat at the Georgetown Dental clinic for four hours, so that I could get one lead/ mercury alloy filling at the bargain basement price of $25. Only I never got the filling, because they’d exceeded their number of charity cases for the day.
But let me be honest. It’s not their fault that I’m fat and my teeth have cavities. Poverty has not stopped me from eating well and often. I just wish I was one of those women who put on all her weight in her chest. Then I could blame my back problems on my extraordinarily large breasts.
