Where Is the Life That Late I Led? (thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Cole Porter)

 

Warning: this is Grandma talking about all the things that are wrong with her body. You might be bored reading that sentence, much less the essay. So feel free to stop here if you don’t think you want to read about my gripes and complaints. I don’t blame you. I’m not proud of this lament.

Most of my life I was a hearty soul with a functional body. Now I have trouble hearing, seeing, and walking.

I have hearing aids. They make a difference but are not the same as my original hearing. Every time I speak, I feel like I’m talking through a PA system. I have trouble making out what people are saying sometimes, but I’m not saying, “What?” to everything.

I was up to blended trifocals when I ran out of money for eye exams and prescription lenses, and as we all know, Medicare does not cover glasses. I have not made it a priority to accumulate enough money to have an eye exam and get new prescription glasses, so I have a whole clutch of reading glasses of various strengths, which are usually lost around the house. My distance vision is still pretty good, which is a mercy, and when I’m not trying to read or write or look at Tik Tok on my kindle, I don’t wear glasses.

After I fell and fractured my L3 vertebra last spring, I was astonished – how could I break my back twice in one lifetime? The L2 was broken in a rollover car accident in 2000. Now L2 and L3 are a matched pair of compaction-fractured bones in my spine. This is one of the conditions that make walking difficult.

Funny (to me) side note: when the L2 vertebra was broken, I ended up with a pinched nerve down my right leg that hurt most of the time and sometimes it felt like my right thigh was on fire. At the time of the fall in which I broke the L3 vertebra, I had sciatica in my right hip and leg that was brought on by sitting in a lousy seat on Frontier Airlines* when I flew back from Denver a few days before I fell. When I fell, the sciatica went away! I still have pain from the pinched nerve in my right thigh, but not as much. Not worth breaking another vertebra, but it is nice to have one good thing come out of the experience.

*Digression:

FRONTIER AIRLINES: They are soulless vacuum cleaners of money. They lure you in with ads for cheap fares, and then after you have paid your cheap fare and think you have bought a ticket to somewhere, you learn that you have only paid for the right to pick out and PAY FOR your seat. My ticket was $31! What a deal! But I paid $47 for an actual seat up near the front of the plane. Seats from about halfway back to the tail were $19, and they were all booked by the time I got to the website.

Then the clerk at the airport told me that it was $39 for luggage, whether you stowed it or carried it on. That’s right: $39 for carry-on luggage.

So. $31 “fare” plus $47 for a seat plus $39 for luggage: $117 for that $31 ticket. The tiny bottles of water they sold on the flight were $3, no cash, plastic only.

That $47 seat brought on sciatica.

So a big thumbs down to Frontier Airlines for their misrepresentation of what it costs to fly on them.

My left knee was ruined in a dog-walking incident a few months after my car wreck in 2000. I was still wearing a metal back brace. Our two dogs and I were out for a stroll when our Doberman, Sadie, took off after a cat, and jerked me sideways and because the back brace held my back straight, something inside the knee was the first thing to give.

As you may be aware, torn ligaments do not heal. They deteriorate. Twenty-one years later I can feel the bones in my knee rubbing together. The fall that tore one of my cruciate ligaments didn’t help, either.

Which is why I was using a cane before I fell and broke my L3 vertebra last May. Now I use a rollator, which is a little sportier than a regular walker, with four wheels and a shelf for carrying things, and for sitting when I’m feeling exhausted.

In 1994 I fell and broke my right arm at the cervical neck – that’s where the ball on the end of the bone goes into the shoulder socket. My arm is shorter, and my shoulder is frozen and hurts every day.

My left hand and fingers are full of arthritis after sixty years of playing guitar. I don’t feel that, or any, pain when I am playing the guitar. Musicians understand that.

So, yeah, the body is not what it was when it came off the assembly line. I am still here and am happy to be so. But I am downright nostalgic for the functions I once took for granted, not to mention the absence of pain.

Can you relate?