The sobering reality of turning 50
JAKARTA (JP): When I turned 50 some months ago, two fundamental truths dawned on me.
First, I realized that I was not getting any younger. It may seem so obvious, and so trite to those still in their infancy, but it is a major revelation to those of us embarking upon our golden years.
There are two kinds of people over 50. Those who accept the obvious, that is, their age, and those who do not. As I see it, the second group vastly outnumbers the first and is growing rapidly.
Just look at the millions of men and women around you who dye their hair, hoping that changing the color would take way the effects of the ill-spent years of their lives. Or the thousands of others who wish to tighten muscles sagging in time with the known laws of gravity.
There are multimillion dollar businesses built around hair care and muscle toning.
Take the woman who advertises regularly in The Jakarta Post's classified ads.
If what she says is true, she should patent her secret and migrate to the U.S., where she would have the potential to sucker a new population to make millions.
She offers a massage in the privacy of one's home for tightening muscles, especially those of fellow women. While her offer may have an oddness of language about it, it is, I am sure, of substantial interest to a vast population with their body parts urgently in need of being "overhauled".
I read a news item in a local magazine about ozone treatment to restore "lost" vitality and virility. Under a doctor's supervision, one's blood is put through a filter and pumped full of health-giving ozone as it reenters the body.
A friend who regularly subscribes to this treatment swore by its efficacy, as well as the high he gets seeing his lackluster blood turn an energetic and bright red on contact with the ozone.
When I told my doctor brother in the U.S about this, all he was interested in was where the doctor got insurance to cover himself.
Other stories from Singapore, about colon irrigation that middle-aged women seemed to rave about, stopped after a few of them had irreparable damage done to their colons.
The second truth I learned when I turned 50 was discovering parts of my body that I did not know existed.
I had always been reasonably active and played the odd set of tennis and did the odd hour of boring treading mill exercise. When my back twitched a bit after a particularly long game of tennis, it did not seem such a big deal, especially when a much older colleague demonstrated his favorite therapy of swinging like a monkey on a high bar to extend the spine.
But disaster struck as I was stepping into my shorts the next morning. My back froze, and remained frozen for a week until nature healed the sprain and restored the use of my limbs.
A while after that, I had to undergo a colonoscopy to check if the bleeding I experienced had any malignant causes. While the humiliation of a piece of tubing being introduced through the nether regions was bad enough, the sight of a gaggle of amused nurses watching it live on color TV was a lot worse.
The saving grace was that my colon was declared free of popsies or whatever.
The last straw for my suffering body was the problem I had with my retina. I had vaguely studied retinas and the like back in biology class.
I never really hoped to encounter them in real life.
However, as my vision blurred in front of my computer screen on a Sunday evening, the wait to the doctor the next morning seemed interminable.
A specialist in Jakarta who could gaze into my retina and tell me the worst took another day to locate. Now that I have had two tears on my retina, I am a kind of local expert and celebrity.
People who lose their vision suddenly, call me up before they contact SOS medical center.
I have not let all this worry me too much, though. After all, Bill and Hillary turned 50 last year, and I haven't got half the problems they do!
-- Ram Ramanantha