Your first realization that you're aging is when you count up the birthdays you've already had and you understand that there are fewer birthdays left in front of you than there are behind you.
Your second realization, as I've posted elsewhere on this blog, is when you retire and go on pensions plus Social Security.
Your next one (gulp) comes when -- first your spouse, and next YOU -- are handed a life-threatening (and potentially life-ending) diagnosis.
After Kathy's diagnosis last year of cancer, it began to hit me that my "happily-ever-after" life story might not last forever. But Kathy and I dug in deep and fought the cancer with everything we had ... not to mention chemotherapy and radiation. Kathy made it fine and her five year clock to be pronounced cancer-free is ticking away happily in the background of our lives.
Then I started coughing this year. And coughing. Every night, I hacked and coughed my lungs out. At the same time, I started doing that disgusting Old Person thing of hawking up gobs of something equally bad from deep in my chest.
I may be fairly bright and well-read as old guys go ... but it took me awhile to realize that this probably wasn't just a sign of Old Personhood.
And it wouldn't go away.
And my doctors all got that straight-faced "You'd better sit down and listen carefully" look when they talked to me about it.
After biopsies and CT-scans and many other assorted medical pokings-and-proddings, we got a kind of catch-all diagnosis. The good news (sort of) is the fact that it's not cancer. The bad news is that it's not going to go away.
The worse news is that it's potentially life-ending.
The "No News" part of this is ... can someone tell me what part of getting older ISN'T life-ending?
As I tried to explain to my family in a private post, "We're all going to die of something." In a way, knowing what's coming -- the actual mechanism that's aiming for me is almost kind of ... calming. It's as though I don't have to constantly look over my shoulder now ... watching for bad stuff or cars careening out of control. Now I know what I've got, now I know how it's going to go (more or less,) and now I can get back to living my life with Kathy.
For those who have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, it's called "Interstitial Lung Disease," and is basically a hardening and scarring of the lung tissue itself. It's progressive, and will gradually get worse.
The doctors tell me that I've got a rare-ish sub-form of this thing that MAY (and I repeat ... may) respond to some drugs that may or may not slow it down.
So one of the first questions my family asked was, "How much more time?"
A bogus question, if ever there was one. As Kathy likes to say, "None of us has an expiration date stamped on our butts."
Besides, if you do it right, living becomes and endless succession of "nows" so that each moment flows by endlessly, and tomorrow is another lifetime away. I'm not worried. It'll come when it comes.
And in the meantime, Kathy and I now have perfect excuses to go traipsing around the world and making memories.
That'll do nicely.
This still sucks.Way too soon.
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