I suspect that not many people of the year 2 000 have read ten-year-old Daisy Ashford's delightful book "The Young Visiters". She writes:"Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42." I can see her point. But nowadays we
don't even think of getting elderly until we are 72, and ladies like Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Madonna will get long past that age before getting near it. Women's magazines and innumerable books on health have page
after page on the menopause and how to cope with it, but little is written about the male equivalent. Since I am undoubtedly in that predicament myself, and of the few patients I see, many are manopausal I think I have enough
experience to be an authority.
My first experience of old age was in my seventies when I was windsurfing on sinkers and found it more and more difficult to do waterstarts. It was partly weakness of the flexor muscles of the arms,
combined with a newly arrived clumsiness. So I gave up windsurfing. Now I've got so clumsy that if I'm invited to a sail on a comfortable yacht with a good meal and some drinks to encourage me, I have to refuse. Boring.
Getting
cataracts was inevitable, I suppose. I wondered why so many yachts were now catamarans with two masts. I discovered that when I played polo it was even more difficult to hit the ball because there were suddenly two balls to hit.
Driving at night, approaching cars had headlights like the star above Bethlehem, with glittering rays sticking out in all directions.
My eye surgeon offered me normal vision, instead of the short sight I've had all my life. How
strange it was to see without specs! But my family said they couldn't recognise me without glasses, so back onto the nose came the unnecessary spectacles!
Why ever did my nose run (not drip) at meals, especially at breakfast. It
turned out that this was a common manopausal problem. Steroids stopped it, but that was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It still runs.
Having earned my living standing on my feet, I really can't grumble that one hip has
failed, that I need a stick or crutches, but the Mistress has urged me to do better with crutches, showing me how to swing along fast, with both feet off the ground! Thank you! How kind! But although I remember the swinging
feeling, my head tells me that I'd soon be on the ground!
Then came my first stroke. !0 a.m..Entirely painless. Suddenly I couldn't sign my name. My speech was drunken. An Xray showed it wasn't a bleed, so now it's a rest-of-life
on rat poison and I don't dare to get a new hip installed since the anticoagulant poison would
have to be stopped, and I might follow the example of a good friend and end up with a major stroke, not enjoying life at all as
a vegetable. Boring!
Luckily I don't have to give up my major addiction, which is, of course, to reading. But it seems that my little stroke has affected my swallowing. Before I recognised this, I would get coughing attacks at
meals, loud choking attacks, and naturally I would read at most meals. Now, very tediously, it's no books at table and hardly any choking. Boring!
So it's high time for this old dog to learn some new tricks. And now I'm on my
third computer. I do wish these experts would use sensible English or even American, instead of being so twee and tarty and joky-woky in their computer language. But I suppose the little darlings are only just out of the nursery.
Forgive them, for they know not what, Hotbot, Google, Jeeves,Yahoo, Screwdoo, Young Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
And what about Viagra? Well, we all know about that!
