What they don’t tell you about getting older is that your conversations, they turn more to health problems and medications. Every person you meet has something wrong. All at once, you know a lot of old people. The obituaries become very interesting. For the vast majority of animals, with increased senescence comes increased complications. Us humans, we’re no different. Past a certain point, to live is to decay. Past a certain point, we are all dying.
I’m out for dinner with a childhood friend and his wife. Jane, she’s telling me about her rash and scratching her arms like mad. They’re red, raw, inflamed, with pale nail marks zigzagging this way and that. Flakes of dead skin fall like snow from her arms to the table. It’s piling up in drifts. Her fingernails, they’re caked with disease. Her husband, Mark, doesn’t seem to notice or he’s trying not to, his eyes fixed on a television screen in the corner of the pub. His wife, she’s falling apart one cell at a time, and Mark can’t take his eyes off the football game.
Antivirals, corticosteroids, analgesics, Jane is telling me about all of her medications when the waitress walks up to ask if we want more drinks. Hearing the word ‘Tylenol,’ the waitress, she begins talking about how she takes T3s for her migraines. She’s been eating them for years. She says it’s the only thing that’ll take the edge off her pain. “My pain.” These words, she says them like she means really means them. Jane scratches away at her arms, listening to the waitress talk about her headaches, her dizziness, her auras, her nausea. The migraines have been getting worse as she gets older, she says. As she gets older, she’s experiencing more pain everywhere, really. This waitress, she can’t be too far past thirty.
Jane tells us Mark gets headaches too; stress related, she says. All part of his generalized anxiety disorder and probably the root of his depression. Me, I can think of other things that might make Mark depressed, but I keep my thoughts to myself. I look over at him, and the television holds his attention. The pint glass in his hand contains beer gone warm and flat, and Mark’s breathing is shallow, his face is a blank. The football game is over, and an infomercial selling electric boots has taken its place. SSRIs, benzodiazepines, opiates, Jane is listing off Mark’s medications while he’s mesmerized by a man demonstrating how to switch on the heaters in these amazing boots. Mark, he isn’t even here.
What they don’t tell you about getting older is that your conversations, they turn more to health problems and medications. Jane scratches at her arms, the table becoming a snow globe, while she and the waitress continue to trade symptoms and prescriptions. Mark, he keeps staring at the television which is now showing a lengthy commercial for a cholesterol drug, a statin of some type. The commercial shows us how taking the drug will improve our lives We’ll go to the fair and ride the Ferris wheel. We’ll snuggle with our partners on the couch. We’ll go out for dinner with friends.
The commercial, it concludes with thirty seconds of side effects, the narrator rattling them off like an auctioneer. Mark is more zoned out than watching. Dizziness, irregular heartbeat, fainting. Jane asks the waitress if she’s tried triptans. She has, she says, and asks Jane if she’s tried itraconazole. She has, she says. Increased hunger, increased thirst, increased urination. Jane asks the waitress if she’s tried ergotamine. She has, she says, and asks if Jane has tried dexamethasone injections. She has, she says. Light-coloured stools, unusual bleeding or bruising, loss of consciousness.
Loss of consciousness, I could use a little of that. I interrupt the waitress while she’s describing her nausea, and I ask for another beer. Whenever she’s got a free moment, I tell her. I ask her to bring one for Mark, as well. Mark acknowledges the gesture with a barely audible grunt, his eyes not leaving the television. Sweating, irritability, death.
During the break in conversation, Jane, she notices the growing desert of diseased skin spreading before her, and attempts to discreetly get rid of it. I watch silently as Jane unceremoniously sweeps herself away, the fine powder of her dead skin falling to the floor like confetti on the eve of a new year.
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