Sunday, May 24, 2009

Health & Aging: A Semi-Humorous Look at What Our Bodies Do To Us

Amazing how we take so many things for granted, isn’t it? In fact, is there anything we don’t take for granted? That we don’t assume will always be there when we need it?

Take, for example, our health. Don’t we assume that we will always be young, that our bodies will always work as if they were still 20 years old? And we live with this assumption, for the most part, until we hit 40, 45 or if we’re lucky, 50. But at the magic number – whatever that might be for each of us – things begin to fall apart – or off! We get tired more quickly, winded more easily and our eye sight gets dimmer. Instead of single lens, we skip bi-fold and go straight to tri-fold lenses! To make matters even worse, our metabolism begins to slow down and it takes a year to lose 5 pounds while it only takes a month to gain 10. The first gray hairs call for an emergency visit to the hair salon. Bones begin to creak and illnesses we’ve never heard of – suddenly, we have them!

The other day I was busy doing……whatever it was I was doing (the mind is the first to go!) when suddenly the room around me was spinning. More accurately – I was spinning – the room was not. What a weird sensation! In a few minutes, the spinning stopped so I blamed it on an overactive imagination (not to be confused with an overactive bladder – another joy of getting older) and went about doing….whatever it was I was doing. But as the evening progressed, the spinning returned and I realized that something out of the ordinary was happening. So the next morning, off to my doctor I go.

I have vertigo. Vertigo?? What the heck is that? She tells me it’s basically dizziness due to inner or middle ear imbalances. (At least she didn’t say a brain imbalance!) So now in addition to the medicine for high cholesterol and a host of other problems, I am taking drugs for this too! Honestly, I could open my own pharmacy!!

(c) 2008 Edwina E. Cowgill

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