Mel Walsh

Happy Geezers---The Truth

Who’s Happy? The Surprising Answer

Do you think that the older you get, the more unhappy you’ll be? Well, that’s a common stereotype, but it’s not true. Researchers at a recent meeting of the American Psychological Association reported that mental health generally improves with age. So we older people aren’t just sitting around in our Depends and our decliners, wailing and waiting for The End.

In fact, more and more national studies such as the General Social Survey are coming up with this truth: older people are happier than middle-aged people. Yes, it’s hard to believe, but here it is again:

It seems that the longer you live, the happier you will be.

How Can That Be So?

            Well, older people do have their challenges such as arthritis and not being able to hear Frank Sinatra songs as well as they used to, but there are compensations---things that make up for health glitches---that produce an increasing level of happiness. So what are these keys to contentment?

            Steering Around Stress

Researcher Susan Charles reported that older people tend to avoid or limit stressful situations. We’ve learned over time what things are likely to hit the fan and we’ve learned to stay away from rooms with fans. Example: When I was younger and less experienced, it took me six months to figure out that a man was a bad actor. Now I can spot one instantly at 50 yards. (It’s kind of like bird-watching, but with no printed guide.)

Another example: we older people learned there are some things we cannot change---like the behavior of family members---so we tend to stop beating our heads against that particular wall. (After all, with the more limited energy that comes with age, we may have to put it towards the survival of ourselves and our spouses. We don’t have the reserves of spirit go through a nervous bustdown because grandchild Jason got nabbed for drugs again. He’ll either learn or he won’t.

 Valuing The Sunset

Another key to elder happiness seems to be this: We know we don’t have a whole life ahead of us, so we want to make the most of the time we have left. We want to enjoy the sunsets of the sunset years. That again means staying away from bad actors and negative situations. Why spoil the remaining time with avoidable agony?

As researcher Charles noted, older people “have had more time to learn and understand the intentions of others which helps them avoid stressful situations”.  So life experience really helps on the happiness front. We know where the traps are.

Hey, it’s taken a lifetime to learn the map of the traps, but it’s paying off. The bluebird of happiness supposedly now knows where we geezers live. (OK, he’s late, but better late than never.)

Help Yourself, Pleeeze!

Face it.

Over 60 and beyond, we are like old cars. Some parts rust.  Others break down. We have to go in for repairs more often. We may need help to keep running and on the road.

But here’s the weird part: Some people refuse to get the help they need to keep up in the traffic of life. Example: the woman who’s unsteady on her feet and refuses to use a cane. She’d rather chance the hip-breaking fall than appear to be unhip. Another example: the man who keeps telling others to speak up. He knows his ears are on the blink, but he won’t wear hearing aids because they will make him look old and out of it. (Actually, his inability to hear, to catch on to jokes, to be part of a conversation is what’s making him out of it, not wearing tiny pods in his ears.)

Can Aging Love Children and Bobby Soxers Accept Help?

Evidently they can if the help is invisible, something inside the body that can’t be seen. Witness the hip replacements, the new knees and the cataract operations that keep older people on the road of life. (I would be a shut-in if I didn’t have access to those lovely titanium hip parts. And going into the cataract removal garage for repairs allows me write this column by sight rather than by Braille.)  But these common fixes seem to be acceptable to older people partly because they are invisible. Nobody knows. The inside fixes are silent. Think of the stents in the heart, the new shoulders, the pace makers and other common inside repairs.

Rejecting the Visible

It’s a different story when it comes to visible aids to independence. People avoid what they think makes them look “old”. Manufacturers of mobility aids such as canes and walkers don’t help when they turn out objects with the aesthetic appeal of rebar. And those old hearing aids were admittedly too large and bulky.

But things are changing. Canes and walking sticks now come in cool designs. Hearing aids have been miniaturized, their functioning greatly improved. (Cranky Pants can turn his up or down while wearing them. In the pizza parlor with grandkids, he turns them up to hear the kids over the din. At home, he turns them down so he won’t hear me tell him what to do. In a word, perfect.) Hearing aids now come in various colors the better to blend in with the hair you may no longer have, but that’s another column.

So if your body has glitches, get help. Because nothing will make you feel older than staying on the sidelines of life because you won’t go in for repairs or accept a lift. 

One Weird Challenge: Staying Well in the Hospital

    Here’s a pop quiz: What kills more Americans every year than AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined? The answer is---infections acquired in the place that is supposed to be hospital-clean---a hospital.

You’ve probably read about superbugs like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a common threat in today’s American hospitals, but did you know there are things you can do for yourself and your family to cut the chances of infection from MRSA or other bad bugs when in any hospital?

Keeping Safe: Personal Actions

Sure, hospitals all over the country should be doing what they can to cut their infection rate, but there are things ordinary people can do to keep from becoming one of the almost 100,000 people who die from hospital-acquired infections every year.  A group called RID, The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, offers many tips on its website, www.hospitalnfection.org.

First, they recommend that hospital personnel clean their hands before treating you so that they don’t spread infections from one patient to another. That may seem obvious to the point of duh!, but a 2004 study found that when doctors in a hospital were secretly observed by infection control experts, only 57% bothered to clean their hands between patients. (Medical students were among those who did the best, surgeons among the worst.)

Now, sometimes a patient is so out of it after treatment that a family member has to be the watchdog on the clean hands issue. And family members would do well to clean their own hands before they come in contact with the patient. Many hospital rooms now have an alcohol hand-cleaning dispenser on the wall, so if you are visiting someone, it’s easy to clean up.

Another tip from RID: wash with chlorhexidine anti-bacterial soap before surgery to cut down the population of bad bugs on the skin. (Cranky Pants’ knee surgeon provided him with special soap and instructions for scrubbing down before surgery.)

Another idea: Bacteria can enter the body through a catheter---a little tube inserted into the urinary tract that will empty the bladder into a plastic bag---not the sexiest part of a hospital stay. RID advises avoiding a urinary tract catheter if at all possible or having the catheter removed as soon as it makes sense. That last advice is easier said than done after surgery, because it’s more convenient to lie back and use a catheter than to get up and walk to the bathroom. But and however, the staff will rightly see that a patient is up, about and off a catheter ASAP.

There are many more tips at www.hospitalinfections.org. But maybe the best advice is to stay healthy so you can stay home, though I would hate to see what bugs lurk on the keyboard of my home computer.

Microsoftia scuzillia?  Ick. Where’s the alcohol wipe?

Big Health Care Liars: Don't Read Their Lips

The truth shall set you free.

Of what? Of worry about the medical myths now making the rounds in Media Mythland. The greatest of these may be the myth that Congress intends to force people to meet with government counselors who will advise them how to die---this to get them off the Medicare rolls. These myths have escalated into major paranoia. Example: the government wants to euthanize old people---Death for Geezers.

So What’s The Truth?

The truth is that most Americans have not yet told their physicians and loved ones what kind of medical care they would like if they become unable to express their own wishes. (Remember Terri Schiavo?)

So say an emergency arises. Someone---maybe you---is too out of it medically to say what treatment you want or don’t want. Spouses and children are left to guess and sometimes fight over treatment options just because the ill person has never signed a living will, known in California as the---long breath here---Advance Health Care Directive Including Power of Attorney for Health Care Decisions.

The House of Representative Attempts to Help

So in the proposed health care reform bill, H.R. 3200---America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009---there’s Section 1233, Advance Care Planning Consultation. It allows people, if they so desire, to consult with a health care practitioner to learn about advance directives including living wills.

This proposed benefit would be completely voluntary. People would not be forced to have a consultation every five years as the mythmakers say. They would not have to have any consultation at all, but my questions are: why wouldn’t you want to know your options? Why wouldn’t you want to control your medical care if you are incapacitated? Most of us don’t want to live on like a two-legged vegetable hooked up to a machine.

Taking Care of Yourself

Here’s an idea: Take action on your own, ignoring both the fear mongers and the partisan fighting in the House of Representatives. Just quietly get done what you want done. The California Medical Association offers a kit, including the Advance Directive, which you can fill out and sign. They offer this help for just 6 bucks.

 Put In a Simple Order

Go to www.cmanet.org and click on Advance Health Care Directive Kit. You can order a single copy or multiples if you want to distribute them to friends, family, club or group. Phone orders will be handled at 415/541-0900, credit card or check accepted. Ask for Karen.

If you want to see the proposed bill, just put HR 3200 into the Google search box. It’s an easy scroll down to Section 1233, the one about the consultation. But hey, why not go over to the park for a picnic instead? Have a consultation with Mother Nature.

It's Not You

One thing older people never forget is that they are afraid of forgetting.

When we forget someone’s name, we remember the A word---Alzheimer’s. One senior moment seems like a certain sentence of dementia. Not true, but what is true is that various medications can cause memory problems---a disturbing side effect that is not well known.

What People Need To Know

While only 12% of the US population, older people account for 30% of all prescriptions. The average older adult takes five prescription drugs along with three over-the-counter drugs. Without getting into an argument about American people being over-prescribed and under-prevented, the fact is that the Rx lines at pharmacies are heavily populated by cotton tops.

 Actually, people of any age who take prescription drugs should know about a Johns Hopkins health alert titled: First Step to Clearing up Memory Loss---Check Your Medications. Here are just some of the drugs that can cause memory loss: the anti-inflammatory prednisone (Deltasone, for example); heartburn drugs such as cimetidine (Tagamet), famotidine (Pepcid), and ranitidine (Zantac). Also causing possible memory loss are anti-anxiety/sedative drugs such a triazolam (Halcion), alprazolam (Xanax) and diazepam (Valium). The health alert goes on to say that even too high a dose of insulin can cause low blood sugar and abnormal mental function. Still other drug classes to watch: meds used for cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, pain, nausea, Parkinson’s disease, allergies and colds.

The good news in the report is that memory loss can often be reversed or minimized by changing meds or lowering the dose under a doctor’s supervision. They also suggest other strategies to keep out of trouble: avoid the use of multiple drugs, see that each drug is carefully monitored by a single primary care doctor and use drug-free periods to see if the effects on memory are really a side effect of the medication.

Given the fragmentation of health care and the many docs one person can go to, it’s smart to always have an updated list of meds in one’s wallet and on the refrigerator. Another tip: Put all your meds in a bag and bring them to your family doctor for review.

Still another smart action: write down when you start a med and what the results are. If your memory acts up after starting a new med, you’ll have the documentation on paper so you don’t have to rely on uncertain recall. Also, after taking a new drug, record any other changes---physical or mental---so you can discuss them with your doctor.

Last, here’s a quote to remember from the JH report: “In geriatric clinics, the most common cause of reversible dementia including memory loss is an adverse reaction to medications”.

So it may not be you after all, but a pill.

Please remember that.

Losing Yourself

Whoa! I lost something and I have no idea where it went.  Specifically, I lost 10% of myself.

When you lose weight, people want to know how you did it. Were you blessed by The Calorie Fairy? Did you live on grapefruit rinds? Then people ask for advice.

I’m no weight loss guru, but I have a few hints for those who want to lose parts of themselves, something they weren’t using anyhow, something like fat.

Here’s what’s working for me: there’s one big thing and then little actions taken a bit at a time. Here’s the big thing:

Turn on your food radar. Use it 24/7. It will seek out and identify good choices as well as alert you to incoming enemy attacks such as restaurant servers who push drinks and desserts.

Then there are the little things:

·      Fill half the dinner plate with veggies.

·      Shop farmers’ markets and produce sections.

·      Use smaller plates and dish out smaller portions.

·      At dinnertime, keep the pots of food in the kitchen and not at the table. That way you have to get up for seconds.

·      Write down what you eat so you can’t cheat. If you bite it, write it.

·      Don’t give up dessert. Just have small helpings once in a while so you don’t feel deprived.

·      Don’t let yourself get hungry. Think ahead and travel with food. Keep an insulated lunch box in the car with goodies---an apple, a stick of low-fat cheese.

·      Cut out sweet drinks including those specialty coffees full of sugar and whipped cream and the caloric shakes. (McDonald’s X Large Triple Thick Shake has 1160 calories.)

·      Consider the math. One pound is 3500 calories. If you want to lose a pound a week, you have to cut 500 calories a day. How to do that? Cut down on alcohol, desserts, second helpings, mindless snacking and supposedly “healthy” stuff. (A large Jamba Juice Orange Dream Machine has 690 calories.)

·      Weigh every morning. (Some experts are against weighing in every day, but I like constant feedback.)

·      Know what you are doing when you eat out. This will be easier if and when all restaurants begin to post the calorie, fat, sugar and salt content of their meals on their menus. For now, you can look up online what might be acceptable at your favorite fast food place. Weight Watchers has a restaurant reference book to put in the car. 

·      Walk briskly for 20 minutes.

Now, to get back to where we started---where does fat go once you lose it? I have consulted the best medical sources and have concluded that fat cells go to the thighs of the cheerleader you hated in high school.

Actually, fat cells don’t go anywhere. They just shrink. 

What to Eat (Really)

            Nutritionists have had to eat their words---a high fiber diet of books and newsprint.

For instance, do you remember when they wrote that we should abandon butter (bad fat) in favor of margarine (then considered a good fat)?  But nutritionists changed their minds and margarine became a bad fat. Enter olive oil, which is now a good fat---unless you consider the calories---120 a tablespoon---which could make it an iffy fat if you are trying to cut back on the size of your fanny print.

Or consider the fact we were told to carbo load---we grazed in pastures of pasta for a while---until we were told the opposite---avoid the pasta if you don’t want to look like an over- stuffed manicotti. Which is what our grandmas told us 50 years ago.

The Food Advice Workers

            For the first time in history, professionals are telling us what to eat. But they have been wrong and they often don’t agree with each other now. (I was researching a piece about weight loss, talking to the major diet professionals of the US. I was told by one that I would never get a consensus on the subject. He was right. I abandoned the piece.)  

            But there’s help in this confusion---one author who says we should listen to ourselves and to what our grandmothers told us before we let the nutrition people sit at the head of our tables---before food merchandisers in the markets and the malls took over our eating choices.

That would be Michael Pollan. His book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, is what to read if you are fed up with the conflicting advice about food. Yes, Michael is our man, a good researcher who was smart enough to ask the nutrition professionals this telling question: What is the one thing you know for sure about a good diet for humans?

The answer: Eat more vegetables. (Ghosts of grandma.)

Here are some of Pollan’s recommendations.

* Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

* Avoid products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or that include high fructose corn syrup.

* Avoid products making health claims. (If they are healthy, they probably don’t have to advertise. Pollan calls this “the silence of the yams”

*Shop the sides of the market---the fresh stuff---and avoid the processed products in the middle.

* Shop farmers’ markets.

* Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Meat should be a side condiment.

* Eat like an omnivore. Get diversity into your diet.

            So you want a guide that will demystify all the baloney about food, read Michael Pollan. I am reasonably sure I won’t have to eat those words. 

You---As Fred Astaire

 

            Hoo boy. I never thought I’d get a big thrill out of a cane---unless Fred Astaire was attached to the end of it. But canes have become works of art. So have hiking sticks and other aids to ambulation.

            Whether you or a loved one wants a cane for medical reasons or a staff for hiking, the choices are now dazzling. There is life beyond boring aluminum canes and rickety sticks for navigating trails.  

Cane Hate

It ‘s a fact. People who need canes will often resist buying one. I know. I was once there myself. I finally bought a wooden number and decorated it to cheer the limping hours. Though I no longer need a cane, I developed an eye for cane design. Or thought I did.

But while I wasn’t looking, cane design has taken off so brilliantly that there is no longer any reason to settle for a frumpy cane. Now you can buy one of hundreds of designs. The choices are overwhelming---floral, paisley, stars, animals, plus hunting and fishing images for guys. There is---I kid you not---even a cane made out of a bull’s reproductive organ, a kind of taxidermist’s trick, but it’s not suitable for lunch with the girls. (Or maybe in 2009 it is. I can’t keep up.)

And even the ugliest canes---quad canes---have gotten a style lift. (Quad canes are super stable with four points hitting the surface rather than just one). They are useful in maintaining balance, but have all the aesthetic appeal of a bed pan. Happily, quads now come in great colors and patterns.

Even More

If you want a folding cane to take on the plane, it’s available.  How about a cane with a flashlight or an alarm? There are also canes with seats, canes that conceal an umbrella and of course, canes that hold a flask—Scotch not provided. I didn’t see one that dispenses pills or holds an iPhone, but maybe that’s coming.

Hiking

If you want a shepherd’s crook to hike like Marie Antoinette or an old thorny stick from Ireland to walk hill and dale, you can get it online. More modern walkers might prefer lightweight trekking sticks that look like ski poles and are good for keeping balance on uncertain terrain. They also take weight off knees and hips, helpful to Boomers with faltering joints.

If searching for a cane, you can look first in the local drug and sport stores for their cane and hiking selections. But if you want to see the whoie wide world of canes, go to www.fashionablecanes.com. If they don’t have a cane for you, it probably doesn’t exist.

They also have gift certificates if you know someone who could use a little stabilizing. But don’t blame me if they buy the bull one.

Get in the Blue Zone

 

            Cavemen were not health planning wonks.

And when it comes to foresight about our own wellbeing, today’s humans are still pretty blind. Our brains were made to think “now”, not two years from now, which is why the idea of chocolate fudge today is so much more forceful than the image of a weigh scale reading a year from now.

So when we humans come up with an idea about health that is future-oriented---living longer, for instance---and we actually motivate a town to think ahead and set itself in motion to get its citizens an extra two years of life---it’s a downright marvel.

It’s also the biggest community project ever undertaken by the AARP.

The town is Albert Lea, MN and, sponsored by the AARP, they are running an experiment, the Vitality Project, where the interested townsfolk practice four keys to a long life. (The keys come from a book written by the Vitality Project’s  leader, Dan Buettner. The book is The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who Are Living The Longest.)

Dan studied the world’s longevity hot spots and for the Vitality Project, he translated the information into four areas. So this is what the town is doing…

The Four Keys

Community Environment: Creating more bike and walking paths, garden plots and a farmer’s market, making it easier to get out and move, making it easier to get fresh plant-based food.

Social Groups: Forming walking and biking clubs. On the walking front, parents and seniors started what they call Walking Buses, where the adults and children form a small pedestrian group to walk the students back and forth to school.

Home and Work Habits: Revamping school and business cafeterias, grocery stores and restaurants. There are also cooking classes that teach people how to prepare healthy meals and how to serve meals from the stovetop and not the table, where it is too easy to reach out for second helpings.

Building the Inner Self: Having a sense of purpose and a strong connection to community is one of the keys to longevity. The Vitality Project offers workshops on how to find activities that offer maximum psychological reward.

Some of the results of the experiment reveal old attitudes. One high school teacher who now walks to school upset her students by leaving her car at home. The kids thought only people who were convicted of drunk driving walked anywhere.

What’s the Future?

We’ll find out in October when results will be announced, but interested townspeople plan to keep on keeping on when the Vitality Project is officially over. Furthermore, the AARP hopes to replicate the positive results they expect throughout the country. If you want to stay up on this fascinating experiment, google AARP Vitality Project where you can sign up for the newsletter.

 

The End of Overeating

Gather round and you shall hear…not that I walked five miles through snow drifts to school—but worse.  Much worse.

When I was young, there was no fast food. No pizza joints, no burger palaces. We ate---are you ready?---real from-scratch foods at home. And there were almost no obese people in America then. Americans, if they looked down, could see their toes, not their belly buttons.

But, after World War II, the GI’s stationed in Italy brought back a taste for a tomato pie called “apizza”, and so the fast and fattening food rush was on. It was joined by McDonald’s and also extended into the supermarkets by a food industry that learned how to put together fat, salt and sugar to make snacks that jumped off the shelf and onto your weight scale.

And so the fattening food tide spread over the land. Now there is almost nowhere that unhealthy food is not available. Public rest rooms are the only places I can think of where you have no chance of running into a Triple Bypass Burger.

The End of Overeating

            That’s the title of a new book by David Kessler, MD, who not only does a convincing job of detailing the spread of fast food throughout the US, but also explains how we as eaters get hooked. He explains why, biochemically speaking, so many of us crave what’s not good for us, a conditioned response often engineered by an industry that states out loud that its purpose is to invent “craveable” foods. And so we become hypereaters.

Dr. Kessler also covers what he calls “food rehab”. Food rehab involves unhhooking from the obsession with unhealthy combinations of fat, salt and sugar.

Basic Rehab

Here is the Cliff Notes version of a few rehab principles according to Kessler:

·                   Know that conditioned hypereating is a biological challenge, not a character flaw.

·                   Conditioned hypereating is a problem that needs to be managed, not cured.

·                   Every time we give in to the urge for sugar, fat and salt, it gets harder for us to act differently the next time.

·                   Lapses are to be expected.

The Restaurant Environment

            Now it’s hard to eat out sensibly if you have no idea about the contents of the food you may order. So Kessler wants restaurant menus to list what is in the dish. (Visualize the labels already required on processed foods---something Kessler made happen as head of the FDA. New York City already mandates this menu info, so it is not only possible, it’s already being done.)

Me, I want to know that a medium Oreo® Sundae Shake at Burger King comes in at 1110 calories and 35 grams of fat.

The book is The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable America Appetite.  

The Invisible Antidepressant

Feeling down?

Well, if I said you could self-administer an upper that didn’t require a prescription or any skuzzy dealings with the drug underworld or pharmacies in faraway lands, would you want it? If I told you even more---that this remedy was invisible but real, would you believe me?

Well, maybe you wouldn’t listen to me, but how about the white-coated docs at Duke University Medical Center who ran several studies comparing the benefits of a prescription antidepressant to the benefits of getting your body up and moving? Intrigued by the many indications that the motion of the body and the state of the mood were connected, the Duke doctors set up a formal study that compared the moods of three groups---those who took an antidepressant, those who did aerobic exercise and those who did both.

After 16 weeks, here’s what they found: People on antidepressants had the most immediate relief of their symptoms, but by the end of the 16 weeks, those who were “just” exercising, had the same relief of symptoms and improvement in mood.

Hi ho----sneakers, just as good as pills. What a concept!

The Mayo Clinic Weighs In

Yep, the folks at Mayo agree and add more: They see four benefits to exercise:

·      Confidence: You meet a goal, you look better, you feel better. In other words, heads up, knockers out and proud of yourself.

·      Distraction. You stop dwelling on how bad you feel and shift your thought patterns to more positive channels like walking out to see the sunset.

·      Interactions. Depression and anxiety can lead to isolation. Going out for a walk with a buddy or going to the gym or an exercise class can get you out of the shell of depression and into some companionship. Even walking Fifi is a companionable experience.

·      Healthy coping. You’re doing something positive about your downer mood. You aren’t drinking excessively to make yourself feel better and not just sitting around hoping the problem will go away.

I’d add my own benefit: By using exercise as a natural upper, you’re not putting yourself in harm’s way from drug side effects. Some of the side effects from antidepressants include insomnia, nausea, diarrhea, loss of libido, weight gain and ironically, suicidal thoughts. On the other hand, to be fair, some people do report great relief from these drugs. I just wonder if they tried walking in the sunshine as a way of upping their moods. (Lack of light is an acknowledged cause of depression.)

The Last Word

Dr. Gary Sachs of Harvard Medical School says: “Here’s your exercise program. Go to the door. Look at your watch. Walk 7.5 minutes in any direction. Then turn around and walk home. Do that at least five days a week.”

We can do that.

All Burned Up

My father-in-law, Cranky Pants, Sr., was sleeping. His house caught fire. Awakened by the noise, he started to get dressed. He put on his pants and his shirt. He was putting on a tie, when neighbor John Madden burst in. (Yes, that Madden.)

Madden said:  For xxxxx sake, get the hell out of here.

And so, before he could put on his coat and tie, Cranky Pants, Sr. was swept to safety along with his wife who thought it sensible to stop first and put on her fur coat.

This is not the fire behavior recommended by www.firesaftey.gov.

The Hot Truth About Fires and Older Adults

            We geezer people are more likely to expire in a fire than younger folks. And the super geezers, 85 and older, are five times more likely to go to heaven through flames. Why?

            Response times slow as one ages. Meds can cause drowsiness and impaired mental function. Old wiring or space heaters put near flammable materials can start fires. People fall asleep with lit cigarettes. Older people who live alone don’t have the extra eyes and ears that detect a fire early enough to get out. Also, some older people cannot smell smoke---their noses took early retirement.

What To Do?

            No matter what age you are, here are some basic precautions:           

·      Install smoke alarms. Two-thirds of fire deaths happen in homes that have no smoke alarms or dead-battery alarms.

·      Check the smoke alarm batteries at least once a year. That’s a nice birthday present to yourself.

·      Make sure there is an alarm near the bedrooms and on every level of the house.

·      Don’t put the alarms too close to a fireplace or kitchen. How do you tell what’s too close? When the darn thing goes off every time you do a stir fry.

·      Give a brief thought to how you would get out of the house if there were a fire.

·      Give yourself this lecture: Once I am out of the house, I will stay out of the house. I will not go back in for family photos or my wallet. (Leave your wallet or purse on a bedside table. You can just grab and run.)            

One More Idea.

      How I love candles---romantic, can’t see the dust. Right now, I always do a bedtime sweep to make sure the candles are out. When I’m 95, I may forget. And that’s where faux candles come in. Battery run, some of them look and act like actual candles. I once tried to light a battery candle, it was so real.

      OK. I am an idiot, but at least I wasn’t putting on a tie in the middle of a bonfire.     

      So stay safe. BBQ is something you eat, not something you are.

Sixteen Tons and What Have You Got?

            Me---and many like me. Refer to us as tubby, pudgy, large or fat, but don’t call us pleasantly plump. There is nothing pleasant about being overweight. Fat looks good on those Ruben’s models, but in real life, fat paves the way to illness, joint problems and a life sentence to Macy’s Women. And, as my friend Cindy says, there is nothing pretty about a stomach that seems to need a sling.

            So what to do?  If you read, you already know the mantras: Eat less, move more, scarf up veggies and fruits, watch portions and so on until we can say it all by heart. But and however, it’s easier to say than do. Why isn’t there a kind of lifestyle 911 that we can call for help? In fact, there is such a group: Weight Watchers.

Anchors Aweigh with Weight Watchers

With flexible weekly meetings and lots of good advice about living in the real food world, Weight Watchers can help. Cranky Pants and I started Weight Watchers and are inspired by the people there who have lost 25 to 45 pounds and kept it off.  

Weight Watchers groups now cover the country. To find the one closest to you, go to www.weightwatchers.com  and click on: Find a Meeting. Or use the phone book.

WW makes it easy to keep going by offering a monthly pass that can be put on a credit card. Go to as many meetings as you like for $39.95 a month.

How Wrong Could I Be?

            Weight Watchers gives out little booklets where you are supposed to record everything you eat and drink. How stupid, thought I. How kindergarten can you get? Well, it works. I can’t lie to myself about what I eat because I can see the evidence of my Inner Pig in print.

            Also cool: WW’s advice is to “keep ahead of hunger”, meaning never let yourself get hungry. They spotlight the extra-filling foods in their literature and I can truthfully say, I don’t get hungry because I am eating all the time. OK, it’s an apple instead of a Twinkie, but it works.

Getting Yourself to Go

 You probably won’t call and won’t go until you have the Last Straw Moment, that time when you’ve just had it with yourself. It could be a glance in the mirror or a photo that shows you two-ax handles wide. Maybe it’s having nothing to wear or maybe it’s a health issue.

 Or perhaps you just want to get back into the dating and mating game, but worry that if you ever got on top of anybody, they would be squashed flat. Death by sex and it would be all your fault.

Whatever your motivation, go with it and go.

 

Vitamin D: Action Hero Painkiller?

            Sounds silly----ordinary old vitamin D as a possible reliever of pain?  Why D is something you get just by baring skin in the sun or buying a cheap supplement at the grocery store.

            But if you have generalized muscle and bone pain, you may want to read what researchers at the Mayo Clinic have found: People with low vitamin D levels take nearly twice as much narcotic medication for pain as people whose vitamin D levels are normal. So far it’s just a correlation between the level of meds people require and their D levels, not a proven cause and effect.

But if a group of people who are low on D require almost twice as much morphine, fentanyl or oxycodone as those with a good D level, well, maybe they are in twice as much pain because they have half as much of what might turn out to be a natural pain preventer or reliever. That’s the theory that has grabbed the attention of medical investigators.

One of them, Dr. Michael Turner, the lead physician of the Mayo study, says: “Vitamin D is known to promote both bone and muscle strength. Conversely, deficiency is an under-recognized source of diffuse pain and impaired neuromuscular functioning. By recognizing it, physicians can significantly improve their patient’s life.“

Personally, I’d add that by bringing the vitamin D/pain theory to the attention of our docs, those plagued by mystery pain with no obvious cause may be on their way to overdue relief.

            On a YouTube video, Dr. Turner adds that people who are overweight seem prone to have pain that may be caused by low vitamin D. He says it’s because vitamin D likes to reside in fat. So when any of us have inviting layers of fat, the vitamin takes up residence in Fat City rather than circulating throughout the body the way it’s supposed to, bathing muscles and bones in a nice D bath.

Dr. Turner also adds that checking D levels requires just a simple inexpensive blood test that can be ordered by your doctor.

 (To see Dr. Turner online, just google: Mayo Pain Turner.)

Can This Happen to You?

            Yes, especially if you are older. Scientists say that about 50 to 60 percent of older people in North America do not have satisfactory vitamin D levels. We older people are not outdoors as much as we were when young. Then we only went inside when the sun set. Outside now, we cover up and use sunscreen, so the sun can’t get through to do it’s D magic on us.

Well, no doc has yet advocated skipping about nude in the sunshine---that would give dermatologists heartburn---but you may want to talk to your doc about vitamin D levels and supplements. 

The View from Inside Cataract Surgery

            If there is any part of the body we humans don’t want anyone to fool with, it’s our eyes. The women I know would rather get a pelvic exam than have anyone poke around in their peepers.

For them and others who fear cataract surgery, I have three words: Get over it! And then get on with attending to any loss of vision that results from a cataract.

What is a cataract?

            As older people age, the lens in their eyes can grow cloudy. The condition is known as having a cataract . As the lens grows more opaque, the process is called ripening. 

Early symptoms? Seeing halos around lights, sensitivity to glare and difficulty seeing at night. Later, an advanced cataract can seriously interfere with vision. In Third World countries, the cataracts can become so advanced, people are blinded and one can actually see the cream-colored lens in their eye---a complete clouding.

            Lucky for us we don’t live on a mountaintop in Nepal, but within calling distance of cataract surgeons, those miracle workers who painlessly extract the cloudy lens and just as painlessly insert a clear new one, cleaning up one’s vision and---I say from experience---upping the mood of older people who realize they don’t have to be the victims of age and nature when it comes to enduring cataracts and the resulting loss of vision.

 Lucky also that Medicare covers cataract operations for older people. People who are against “socialized” medicine such as Medicare may change their minds once they begin seeing again. (Also cheery: people can be more productive and stay independent longer if their vision is restored, to say nothing of what the surgery will do for the easier reading of this newspaper.)

Really, Should I Be Scared?

No. The operation itself takes about 20 or 30 minutes, about as long as all the insurance paperwork. The client is typically given a sedative. Ten milligrams of Valium certainly made me not have a care in the world.  A little device–again painless—holds your eye open so you don’t even have to worry about not blinking. Then you see a lot of bright light and some colors. That’s it.

After the Surgery

`I went out to breakfast with Cranky Pants after my surgery, but did nap and lie around like a pooped puppy the rest of the day. Clients are given two kinds of eye drops to use after surgery. As for vision after surgery, it may take a while for a blur to disappear. I, on the other hand, could see well right off the bat.

Docs don’t like to work on both eyes at once, so a second surgery is scheduled if there are cataracts in both eyes. But by then, you’ll be an old hand.

Or is it an old eye?

When Mom Gives Up On the Kitchen

 

            Tea and toast---that’s what my mom lived on for a while in her 80’s until the rest of us found out. Asked why she teetered on the edge of malnutrition when she had access to groceries, she said: Because it was easy.

            OK, being cooking-fatigued in my 70’s, I get that. Older women have cooked for 50 years and may want to retire after decades of looking deeply into a frying pan.

What I also get is that mom was not alone. Older people as a group are at risk of malnutrition. In Sweden, a study of 436 seniors between 75 and 80 found about 15% were at risk of malnutrition and that’s in a First World country with good services for seniors. Surprisingly, women were at higher risk than men---which may again indicate women get really sick of slinging the family hash. Everybody gets to retire but the family cook.

Women who lived alone were at the highest risk and I understand that too.  Many of us will keep on cooking for the other person in the house, but when we live alone, it doesn’t seem worth the trouble to shop, cook and clean-up for one. Heck, it’s just me for dinner.

And so we have tea and toast. Or maybe cornflakes for dinner.

In the Swedish study (May issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing), people who were in poor health tended to take the worst culinary care of themselves. Why? It’s hard for anyone with arthritis to even open a can or jar. It’s difficult for the vision-impaired to measure ingredients.

So What Are the Solutions?

There are community answers that are big---group lunch programs and home-delivered meals. And there are community answers that are small---sharing the meal you just cooked with the older person next door. 

As for formal meal programs, most areas in the US have a group lunch program and some kind of Meals on Wheels home delivery service. To find the meal programs in your area, call Eldercare Locator at 800-677-1116.  In Grass Valley, one phone number will yield information about the group lunches at the High Noon Café and home-delivered meals: 530-273-4961.

On the personal side, offer to bring non-driving neighbors to the grocery store. Or ask if you can pick up a few things for them. Share the too many strawberries you just bought. Leave meals in the freezer when you visit the oldsters in the family. Introduce them to meal programs and write down the phone numbers for group lunches and home-delivery.

And tell them a truth about contemporary life. These programs are not a depression-era breadline thing. Forget the stereotype of a soup kitchen. Today’s nutrition programs are edible thanks for what older people have given the rest of us over a lifetime.

 

Sometimes I talk to myself in public. Some would call this insanity, but I call it writing a column.

 Columns are the way I lecture myself and of course, you too. Together we learn to up our Vitamin D, check out our blood pressure and note the salt content of prepared foods such as pizza before we scarf down a day’s salt limit in one encounter with pepperoni.

So here’s another of those self-lectures---this one about how to stay independent, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into the years ahead.

 First, the bad news from a study at the University of Pittsburgh.  Women are living longer than men, but some of them aren’t living better. Women who gained weight over the years and women with arthritis are more likely than other women to be disabled in their later years.

Translation: Being disabled can mean needing help from our children, the ones we say we don’t want to bother in our old age. Being disabled can also mean we miss a lot of family fun. Example: If we are obese to the waddle point, we are not going to take nature walks our grandkids. And forget travel. On most trips, we have to be able to get up and keep up. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to stay home sitting in my decliner, watching Golden Girl re-runs while I miss out on seeing the rest of the world.

Trying for Better As Well As Longer

The experts at the University of Pittsburgh expect things to get worse unless we get smarter. Obesity rates are still rising which will translate into rising disability rates. This trend will have an enormous impact on the quality of life of older women.  So can you say expensive in-home care? Can you say nursing home?

To be fair, skilled nursing facilities can be a godsend and despite the stereotype, some of them are well-run. (Aside: check out the turnover rate of the facility’s staff. If they are in and out fast, you should be too. However, if they remain on the job, it may mean they and their patients are well-treated.)  Still, a nursing home is not the upbeat mental picture most of us want to have about our old age.

So let me ask: What’s the five-star movie in your head about being 60, 70. 80, 90 and 100?

Mine involves a much thinner woman, one whose joints are not aggravated by the weight she puts on them. She is folk dancing on the terrace of Nepenthe in Big Sur.  She is waltzing at the weddings of great grand kids. She is still writing columns hoping to preach herself into good behavior.

And I hope you dance along with me.

Up The Medical Creek---But With a Paddle

  When it comes to navigating the health care system, do you feel up the creek without a paddle? Or In middle of the Pacific without a paddle and there are fins following the canoe?

Well, if you’re in a hospital on your own without a human angel watching over you, you may feel as though you are at sea alone. So assemble a care posse to help out if you are going to a hospital. Don’t go in without family or friends to watch over your care and speak up if you are in la-la-land or just too sick to speak up yourself.

Take a simple, common problem: Suppose the controller device that rings for help is beyond the reach of the hospitalized person.  A buddy can make sure the controller is always within reach.  A buddy can also go out to the nurse’s station to ask for help that has not been forthcoming when the controller buttons have been pressed. And pressed.

A buddy can also make sure the tray table hasn’t been shoved out of the way and inaccessible. I have seen many people unable to reach their bedside water supply.

Can you say post-op dehydration?

 

Medical Patientry 101

                    Whether it’s you that's entangled in a complex health care system or a loved one, it’s important that you learn how to navigate the bumps. But few are taught medical system literacy. So here are a few of the issues where we need expert coaching: Asking for a second opinion without offending the doctor; asking the right questions about diagnosis and treatment; requesting infection-control procedures before anyone works on you or inserts an IV; double-checking the dosage and name of meds, understanding consent forms and much more.

There’s Help: Books

            Patient advocacy is just coming into its own as a life skill. If you want to read up---here are some options:

            The Empowered Patient: Hundreds of Life-Saving Facts, Action Steps and Strategies You Need to Know, by Dr. Julia Hallisy.

            YOU: The Smart Patient…Insider’s Handbook for Getting the Best Treatment, by Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz.

More Help: The Web

            Mouse on over to www.everypatientsadvocate.com. That’s the site for Trisha Torrey, who is also About.com’s expert on patient empowerment. She offers down-to-earth advice and usable facts---the only kind of fact my mind will glom onto. (No, I don’t even know when the Battle of 1066 was.) Look at Trish’s site and check out her article about how to evaluate medical “news”.

In-Person Help: A Conference

            Big doings in San Francisco on the patient empowerment front: a May 16^th conference called Empowered Health Care, keynoted by Dean Ornish, MD.  More info at www.empoweredhealthcon.com.           

            In sum---all us medically involved mice quivering before the system should cheer up. It is possible to be assertive while sporting a bare-bottomed hospital gown.

Take Your Driving Self-Test Here!

  Every parent says it: I don’t want to be a burden on my kids.

            That sentiment shows parents are beyond wonderful. Their kids have been a burden to them for decades and yet the parents don’t want to get back at the buggers.

            However, if you really don’t want to burden your kids, think outside the usual box of horrors---the one that involves nursing homes and you with the mental capacity of a daffodil. Imagine instead what a burden it will be for your kids to have a parent on the road who should not be driving. Think of the worries your children will have---images of geezer you mashed up in a car crash. 

            Further, collisions are not the path to geezer health and independence. If you get into trouble, your kids are the ones that will have the burden of visiting the ER, neglecting their jobs and children to look after you.        .

How To Know If You Should Hang Up the Car Keys

            The AARP puts forth these warning signs---their list, my words:

·      Your parking is way off. Not within the lines.

·      Scrapes and dings, not only on the car, but on the garage, mailboxes or fences.

·      Fender benders.

·      Stopping in traffic for no reason.

·      Getting lost a lot.

·      Not using signals or using them wrong---driving a hundred miles on a freeway with your left clicker on.

·      Hard for you to move into the correct lane of traffic.

·      Hitting curbs.

·      Driving too fast or too slow.

·      Slow response to surprise situations.

·      Getting all worked up when driving.

·      More close calls.

·      Claiming that “cars come out of nowhere” at you.

·      Trouble getting your foot from the gas to the brake.

·      Clueless about dangerous situations.

 

            I’d add a few more things: If your children tell you that it’s time to stop driving, they are probably right. If you have trouble seeing at night and can’t tell a black-coated person on the roadside from a penguin out for a stroll, it’s time to stop driving after dark.

            Other things to watch:  you‘ve gotten so short with age, you can’t see over the dash. Or you can’t turn your neck to check out the blind spot and everything looks like a blind spot.

 

            The truth is, some day, if we live long enough, we all will have to stop driving and it’s a good idea to begin thinking now how get to the store, the doc or your favorite watering hole. This is easier said than done, but public transport, friends, neighbors and moving into a town center in the later years are all possibilities.

            So is taking a younger lover with a clean driving record. Your choice.

           

Staying Alive: Low-Salt Living Is Part of the Plan

Somebody out there cares about you.

The American Medical Association is going to bat for your heart and circulatory system, meaning the docs want to keep you from congestive heart failure or a stroke induced by high blood pressure.

The AMA says one very effective way to avoid these health disasters is to cut back on salt. Salt keeps water in the body and makes blood pressure go up. Why? The system has more fluid in it, but it’s the same old circulatory pipes that have to handle the extra pressure. (You don’t have to be a plumber to get the concept.)

The Coming Salt Wars

 Right now, most of us eat twice as much salt as is good for us. So the AMA, which has never before requested the regulation of a food ingredient, has asked the FDA to classify salt as a food additive. That would mean the packaged food companies would have to limit how much salt they can add to your frozen dinners, chip snacks, popcorn, canned goods and ready-to-cook pizzas.

Of course, industry interests will fight the AMA and so it will go. But we don’t have to sit on the sidelines watching the coming salt wars. We can control our salt intake here and now.

Easier Said Than Done

Since supermarkets are hidden salt traps, you have to be alert when shopping. Start reading those labels with this in mind: The Center for Disease Control says 1500 mgs a day is the upper limit of what most of us should have. Some frozen dinners have more than that for just one meal. But there are low-salt foods out there. Also, look for places where you can order groceries online such as www.healthyheartmarket.com.

In the dairy department, pick low salt cheeses. Swiss, ricotta and fresh mozzarella tend to be less salty. The deli case may have low-salt turkey for sandwiches. The freezer may offer little cubes of frozen herbs---garlic, basil, parsley---to punch up meals

Mitigating the Salt Disaster

There are ways to cut the salt of prepared products. I use canned chicken broth, cut it with water and add a splash of sesame oil to jump up the flavor. I cut mayo with yogurt or no-fat sour cream. (FAGE no-fat yogurt is a winner.) Or use less of a salty product---just a small swipe of mustard rather than a slather.

Instead of high salt crackers, try no-salt matzos. They are excellent carriers of dips and peanut butter.

The good news is that this salt reduction program is likely to work to lower blood pressure. The other news it that it may push you into more from-scratch cooking with fresh ingredients. If so, here’s some help: The No-Salt, Lowest Sodium Cookbook by Donald Gazzaniga. And don’t miss this fabulous blog full of tips and recipes: http://dontsalt.blogspot.com.  

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist, author and columnist. Her latest book, Hot Granny, is available at www.Amazon.com.

 

On the Road Still: Staying in Charge of Your Driving

Question: Would you like to extend your safe driving lifetime by many years? Or do you want to hang up your car keys too early, either because of an accident or because you haven’t reviewed the rules of the road since you last made out in a Nash?

            Well, if you want to keep safe and happy on the road, consider the AARP Driver Safety Program, the nation’s first and largest classroom refresher course for motorists 50 and over. Also, any age driver can take the online version of the course at www.aarp.org.

            So Why Go?

            Partly to update your knowledge of driving technique. Example: It used to be that people were taught to hold on to the steering wheel at clock positions 10 and 2. Now the recommendations are 8 and 4 o’clock, so when and if an airbag pops out at 600 miles an hour, that airbag won’t throw your arms into your face.

            And then, do you know how far your chest should be from the steering wheel so you won’t get injured by the airbag in an accident? Ten to 12 inches . That’s easy for people with long arms, but manageable for the rest of us. (Further airbag hint: if, like me, you like to put your legs up on the dash during a long trip as a passenger, don’t. The force of the airbag can turn us into human pretzels.)

            Another example of changing rules: older people were taught to pump their brakes, but today, you don’t do that when cars have ABS, an anti-lock braking system. Instead, you just stay steady down on that brake. (To check for ABS, look for an ABS symbol on the dash when you turn the car on.)

            So What Else Is There To Know?

            Lots. Driving is like love-making. Just because you’ve been doing it for years doesn’t mean you know all there is to know on the subject. For instance, do you know how older adults get in trouble on the road? Are you thinking highway driving? Nope. It’s intersections. At least 40% of fatal crashes for drivers 75 and older take place at intersections.

            Why? The vision changes that come with age have a lot to do with it. Your peripheral vision (side vision) and depth perception (judging the speed and distance of oncoming traffic) both diminish with age. You may think “that car came out of nowhere” to crash into your side at an intersection, but it could have been that older eyes were playing depth perception tricks.

            How Do I Find an AARP Course Near Me?

            Go to AARP.org and put Driver Safety Search into the search box. More info at 1-888-227-7669. 

 Watch out for the intersections on the way to class.

Halt The Salt

 

We’re a nation of salt junkies, but to sober us up, the experts at the Center for Disease Control are finally getting the message out about salt’s connection to high blood pressure. In a recent report, the CDC says we eat far too much salt, especially in processed and prepared food. A single frozen meal may have as much as a teaspoon of salt--about 2500 mgs. Same for those cans of soup in your pantry. Sea ‘o salt.

And going out to eat will not save us. Fast food meals are also loaded with salt. So are chips, nuts, hot dogs and many of the foods that are not fresh and not prepared by your own darling hands.

So Who Cares?

            Probably you should. As the Center For Disease Control says: Too much salt is bad for your health: “It can increase your blood pressure and your risk for a heart attack or stroke”. Since these conditions are among the leading causes of death in the US, salt is not just a matter of taste, it can be a matter of life or death. Personally, since I have cut my salt consumption, my blood pressure has fallen from one-hundred-and-awful over mumble-eight to something that doesn’t make the nurse turn pale.

Currently, the recommended limit is 2,300 mgs of salt a day---about a teaspoon---but the CDC says most people would be better off at 1,500 mgs a day, hard to do if your food groups are the three currently popular choices: canned, frozen and fast.

But, once you make the salt breakaway, you can taste the food underneath the disguise of sodium. And you certainly do build up a shelf of herbs and spices. Pepper is a help here as is Chinese Five Spice Powder for sauces and soups plus Garam Masala which I add to almost anything just to wake up the people at the table.

Grow your Own Taste

Now is great to start a mini herb garden. I grabbed some clay pots and just put in chives, oregano, peppermint, spearmint, chocolate mint, dill, basil, lemon verbena, lemon balm and bay. I also keep a water glass filled with a bunch of parsley next to the stovetop. You could do the same with any green herbs you love. Snip them over what’s in the frying pan.

Additionally, a lemon in the fridge is always good to add zing and I pour orange juice, the taste of sunshine, over everything but Cranky Pants. It’s especially good on fruit compotes and baking chicken parts.

Next week there’ll be more about a low-salt lifestyle that won’t bore your taste buds, but meanwhile, one excellent paperback is Cooking Without a Grain of Salt, by Elma Bagg, Susan Bagg Todd and Robert Ely Bagg.

They show how to get high taste without getting high blood pressure.

Good on them.

Hunting for Docs

 

            Tell me I’m not hallucinating. I remember when people could call a doctor’s office and get in that day. The wait was hours, not weeks or months.

It would take a book, not a column, to say how and why the medical delivery system has changed over time, so I’ll stick to a smaller point: I have a friend who was peeing blood and the urologist in her medical system couldn’t see her for a month. Anyone with a bladder infection knows how uncomfortable it is. An appointment the next hour seems too far away. (She found care elsewhere.)

            My conclusion from that and the many other reports I’ve heard is that there are not enough doctors in CA. Sure, you can get into the debate about whether we have a shortage or not. Some think it’s just that we practice medicine inefficiently. (See the various reports at the Kaiser Family Foundation, www.kff.org. )

Well, maybe that’s it, but I cannot discount the stories I hear from people all over CA. Here are some of their experiences and they certainly seem related to short staffing:

* Appointments for an office visit not available for months even though the condition seems urgent, painful or medically pressing.

* Urgent care centers so crowded one can wait for 3 or 4 hours.

* Emergency rooms so overwhelmed that unless you are bleeding profusely or have fallen on the floor in a spectacular fit, you will grow roots in your fanny sitting in the waiting room.

Urgent care centers and ER’s are often overwhelmed because people are using them for un-urgent care like colds. And they are doing this partly because they don’t have a primary care/family doctor.

Trying to Find A Family Doc

To their credit, the urgent care center I visited last week on the California coast was trying to solve the problem of people cluttering urgent care with their sniffles. At the end of the visit, the staff gave out a helpful list to clients without a family doctor. It was titled: Primary Care Physicians Accepting New Patients.

Study the list. Find a doc. That was the good idea. But I noticed that several of the docs listed said their practices were closed to new patients, but maybe they would accept patients on a case-by-case basis. Other docs refused to treat people who were covered by Medicare, Blue Cross, Aetna or Tricare. Another put a geographical cutoff on his practice He only accepted patients who lived in certain nearby towns. Some wanted yearly retainers of up to $3000.

It sure seemed like looking for a doc in a haystack.

Don’t Blame the Docs

They are the victims too. When’s the last time you saw a happy relaxed doc who had an active practice? They are overworked and caught in the same inefficient system you are. And even those who give up a private practice to work in something like an urgent care clinic are still overworked--- sometimes 12 hours a day.

And then they have insurance matters strangling their practices and student loans weighing on their earnings. Further, some in rural areas are poorly reimbursed for their services by Medicare and other organizations. What’s more, the doctors who are doing basic family practice and primary care, earn way less than the specialists.

We’ll see if the stimulus money is intelligently applied to improve some of these issues. People like Senator Charles Grassley are on the case to improve access to primary care. And we’ll see what President Obama does, but I say that there is something you and I can do without being elected to Congress or the White House. Here’s the plan:

Do everything possible to stay healthy and out of the broken system. And you know the drill: Eat fresh veggies and fruits, fish, whole grains. Exercise a half-hour most days. Stop smoking. Stop over-drinking. Stop OD-ing on a toxic mix of legal drugs. Some people I know take 12 drugs.

And how did they get them from doctors they can’t get in to see?

Canada? Mexico? Borrowing from a friend? Stealing from Mom’s medicine cabinet? I don’t know,

What I know for sure is we have some control here and we are foolish not to use our power to surf this mess.

So---and I really mean it—take care of yourself.

Clean 'N Green: The Way of the Geezer Healthnik

I love your lungs. In fact, I love everything that keeps you healthy, breathing and reading this column. But and however, it has come to my attention that you sometimes use cleaning products that are not good for you, that are bad for the environment and hard on your poor old tattered wallet, the one that used to have money in it.

            And Karen Logan feels the same way about these issues. She’s the author of Clean House, Clean Planet: Clean Your House for Pennies a Day The Safe, Nontoxic Way.  She begins with a list of the bad guy chemicals, the ones we spray and scrub with, such as ammonia, bleach, formaldehyde, lye, sulfuric acid and other chemicals. They are especially not good for young people or for us oldsters who may already have compromised health and so-so lungs that aren’t what they used to be.

But I didn’t need Ms. Logan to tell me about the effect of some cleaning products. I know after I use them it is sometimes hard to breath for the rest of the day, especially after using sprays to shine glass and mirrors.

            What I did need were some clues about safer nontoxic ways to keep the nest from looking like a pigpen, a thing I have never seen, but I imagine pigs don’t clean their bathroom mirrors. So here are a few of her ideas, tested in my own house, the home of mediocre but well-meant housekeeping. Actually, Ms. Logan’s products might make me a better housekeeper since I can breath easy after I use them.

Miracle Glass and Mirror Cleaner

            You have to try this to believe it, but club soda, applied with a spray bottle, is a very effective glass cleaner. It takes a little longer to dry than the commercial blue spray many of us use, but it cleans as well if not better. The trick is to use a lint-free cloth to rub the club soda around after spraying and another lint-free cloth to dry the surface to a sparkle. (I just use two ends of one long cloth---one end to rub the stuff around, the other to dry with.)

            Something funny happened to me when I first used club soda. The spray bottle began spraying on its own. Ah, a haunted sprayer.

            No, it was just the bubbles in the fresh club soda trying to get out of the spray bottle. So I took the top off, let the bubbles out and it’s now behaving.

Another Cleaner, This for Floors and Other Surfaces

            I’ve tried the vinegar spray routine as a floor and surface cleaner and abandoned it because I hated the house smelling like a salad, but there’s a way to get the cleaning and disinfecting power of vinegar and have a spray that smells good. Here’s Ms. Logan’s recipe.

            Fill a spray bottle half way up with water. (She uses a two-cup sprayer. I go for a three-cup number.) Fill the other half of the bottle with white distilled vinegar. (Don’t use wine or apple vinegar, just the clear stuff.)

Here’s the smart part: Add 15 to 20 drops of essential oil to make it smell nice. She uses peppermint oil, I use clove. You may use lemon or lavender or whatever you can pick up in the essential oil section of your health food store. Heck, go for it and use jasmine and pretend you are cleaning floors in Maui.

This simple concoction can be sprayed on floors and other surfaces. I’ve begun using it on everything in the bathroom and if Cranky Pants gets dirty, he may get spritzed.

 

So white vinegar, water and a scent. Simple.

Clean House, Clean Planet has many other recipes and then, of course, you can pick up more ideas with an online search. Dr. Andrew Weil has some cleaning recipes at http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/ART00580.

Now, I think I’ll refill my club soda bottle and watch it spray all by itself.

 Hey, it’s hot times here at the Mediocre Housekeeping Institute.

Plants as Heroes

Well, you better stop breathing now. That’s if you have typical indoor air contaminated by formaldehyde, xylene, benzene and other badzenes and nastyhydes. Where does this toxic mix come from?

            Carpets, particle board, paints, photocopiers, wall coverings, adhesives, gas stoves, grocery bags and cleaning products for starters. And today, indoor spaces are more efficiently sealed to save energy and protect us from drafts---that is, fresh air. An old log cabin let in plenty of fresh air. A super-insulated home keeps old air in and fresh air out.

So What?

According to the indoor air experts, there are at least eight answers: allergies, asthma, eye/nose/throat irritation, fatigue, headache, nervous system disorders, respiratory congestion and sinus congestion. I’d add that old indoor air just smells bad. Call it second-hand breath or stale air, it’s not what we were meant to put in our lungs and yet most of us spend most of our time inside. 

One Simple Solution

Open the doors and windows. Yes, that’s not the best idea when it comes to saving energy in the winter, but some of us clean out our insulated living boxes with a quick airing of the house every day. As Emily Dickinson said: “Inebriate of air am I….” meaning the lady got high on oxygen. Me, too. and I’m not alone.

In the last century, some houses were even constructed with sleeping porches. They had roofs and were screened and sometimes even had pull-down wall beds, so people had at least eight hours of fresh air.

Other Options: Plants As Air Fresheners

            Yes, plants look pretty, but a Boston fern is more than just a pretty face. It and other houseplants act as air filters for polluted air. They can take the badzenes out of the air and deliver them to the good bacteria at their roots. These helpful bacteria in the plant pot then break down the pollutants. OK, that’s simplified, but essentially what happens.

            The expert on this process is NASA scientist, Dr. B. C. Wolverton, he who has turned his experience with space capsules and fresh air into a good book, How To Grow Fresh Air: 50 Houseplants that Purify Your Home or Office.

            This book has excellent photographs of each plant, rates them for effectiveness in cleaning the air and ease of growing. Care directions are given and happily, most plants here do not need a lot of light.

Here are some of his stars, commonly available houseplants, some of which you may already have:

His top recommended plants include Boston fern and a look-alike, a fern called Kimberly Queen. Then there’s the well-known Peace Lily, which will bloom readily indoors and once tried to take over my master bedroom. Wolverton also says English ivy is an excellent filter.

Larger air heroes include indoor palms such areca, lady, dwarf date and bamboo palms. The rubber plant—hard to kill—also turns out to be a good filter as well as the ever-present ficus, or weeping fig.

 

Your Own Little Air Space

Wolverton recommends clustering the plants around what he calls “a personal breathing zone”. You probably have at least 3 personal breathing zones, places where you spend a lot of time. Think bed, desk chair and designated TV watching spot.

I am about to set up a little fern forest around my PB Zones. If Wolverton and NASA ever turn out to be wrong, I will still have a pleasant Garden of Ease and Comfort and a good level of plant-induced humidity. That moisture should keep me from drying out and crumbling into geezer dust.

A Very Moving Tale

This is a very moving story—literally. It’s one for Boomers and their aging parents, and I’ll start it with a question: Have you ever heard of Move Management?

Well, it’s a new and growing industry with about 500 specialists dotted across the United States. When older people decide to move to a retirement community or to assisted living, move managers can take on the burden of the move, leaving the family free to fight about who gets the turkey platter.

Seriously, move managers help the older person through the emotional trauma of downsizing. They sort, organize and pack possessions, give designated items to charity or family members, make dump runs, run tag or estate sales, manage the actual truck move and then arrange the new place so that it replicates the best parts of the old home.

Those move managers whose talent is interior design may oversee painting the new place in favorite colors, arranging the furniture in a familiar pattern and inventing a special  display of the objects and photos that mean the most to the movee.  The end result? There’s no place like the new home---except maybe the old one, but smaller and more edited.

Who Needs a Move Manager?

Can you say millions of us?

If you have ever helped an older parent move out of the old family home into a new smaller apartment, you’ll know how nice it would have been to have expert help during the process. It took my sister and me six weeks to help mom go through the house and garage, decide what to take, dispose of the rest, get the house ready for sale and we were still not finished after six weeks of seven days a week labor.

It would have been great to have a professional direct the proceedings and maybe instruct the men who were cleaning out the garage not to throw and break bottles of 1950’s insecticides into the dumpster.  (When the dumpster began steaming, the town hazmat squad arrived to prevent another Bhopal.)

Well, that was just us, but many are the hurdles to cleaning out the old family home and resettling in a new and smaller nest. There are not only logistics to consider, there are all the emotions connected to leave-taking and change, so a talented move manager will listen to the older person and make sure that when it comes to prized possessions, he/she has the best of the best in the new place. (Example, a vast collection of family photographs can be edited down to the outstanding pictures which can be enlarged, reframed and lit in a special display--- much better than photos sitting in old shoeboxes.)

If you want to talk to a move manager, go to the website of the National Association of Senior Move Managers at www.nasmm.org. Look for the state-by-state search engine. Also ask the manager of any retirement facility. They may have a recommendation. Then, too, some professional organizers will take on senior moves. Find them in the Yellow Pages under organizing services or at the web site of the National Association of Professional Organizers, www.napo.net. Search there under moving/relocation services.

            Opportunity for a Business

            Boomers looking for a business opportunity in a down market may want to learn more about starting a move management business. Begin at www.nasmm.org and also Google: Move Management Washington Post. There you will find an article about how other people started in the business.

            Finding a growing business opportunity in 2009 may be the most moving experience of all. Good luck.

Killer Light Bulbs?

Sometimes the developing news in modern medicine is hard to digest. I had trouble believing that any responsible fertility doc would help a woman into a pregnancy that ended in octuplets when the woman already had six in vitro offspring, no visible means of support and no helping hand from a life partner.

            So I had just struggled with that news when this report popped up on my computer screen:

There is a credible link between cancer and artificial night lighting. While nothing is proved---your desk light is not going to kill you tonight---various studies indicate that people who live or work under nighttime illumination---think graveyard shift workers or night nurses---have a higher rate of cancer than those who don’t. This link seems especially true of prostate and breast cancers.

How Could This Be So?

The best guess so far is that artificial light suppresses the production of the hormone melatonin, the hormone that regulates our natural rhythms. When people live under artificial light at night, it causes melatonin production to drop off.

So what? Well, studies done on rats and conducted in lab Petri dishes indicate that melatonin does slow the development of cancers. So the theory goes that in humans, if the melatonin supplies go down, the risk of cancers goes up.

High in the Sky

Well, this theory was so intriguing to some researchers, they thought up a new way to cross-check the evidence of a night lighting/cancer connection. They used satellite info to detect the most illuminated countries on the planet---they looked at 164 countries---and compared that to the rate of prostate cancer in each country. The rate of prostate cancer was higher in the brightly lit parts of the globe, adding another piece of the puzzle to the theory. 

Now, one way we readers of medical info go wrong is to confuse a relationship with cause and effect. Just because there is a relationship between night illumination and higher cancer rates does not prove one caused the other. However, if several human and lab studies indicate the same connection, and if observations from a satellite also indicate the same connection, then these researchers may be on to something. As David Blask, a professor at Tulane, states: “Put all this together and it argues pretty strongly that light-induced melatonin suppression may be at the heart of this.”

So what’s a 1000-watt night owl to do? Probably nothing until the evidence is clearer and even then, the solution may be simply to take melatonin tablets.

As for the issue of staying up into the wee hours under bright lights, I’m not worried for myself or my age peers. The only lights we see after 9 PM are our bedroom nightlights, probably not visible by satellite.

 

What's In Your Ears?

I have frogs in my ears. They sound like spring peepers on speed. Other people report they have bees, frying pans or dental drills in their ears---at least that’s what it sounds like with a condition called tinnitus.

            Tinnitus is a buzzing or a high-pitched sound in the ear. There are no frogs, bees, frying pans or drills present. There is just phantom noise, usually worse when it is quiet and there are no other sounds around to mask the concert in the head.

Tinnitius is associated with hearing loss and with age---around 13% of people 65 and older have a din in their ears. Exposure to very loud noises can cause tinnitus, not only in older people with ears damaged by high-decibel rock concerts or noisy workplaces, but even in the young who are exposed to loud noises whatever the source. According to audiologist Theresa Schultz, hearing loss with tinnitus is the primary cause of disability for veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think gunfire and grenades.

For some, the sound of tinnitus is so loud and persistent, it damages the quality of their lives. They form support groups. They go to audiologists seeking relief. For other like me, it’s a low buzz at night, but playing a radio or a CD masks the sound. Replacing the frogs with music can work.

Mystery Noises, Mystery Workings

Nobody knows the actual physical pathways of tinnitus, but some think it originates in the central nervous system and has multiple causes. Besides noise-induced damage to the ears, tinnitus is sometimes associated with ear infections, earwax build-up and the use of aspirin or other drugs.

Is there a cure? Well, some strategies can mitigate the problem. Sometimes a hearing aid will reduce symptoms. Soft background music can help. So can sound machines. There are sound machines where the user can choose to listen to waves, running water, rain and other natural noises. (If they ever make one featuring spring peepers, count me out. I get peeped up on my own.)

Sound machines can be investigated at www.soundmachinesdirect.com, but a cheaper solution is to use whatever you already have to generate soft and relaxing music---a radio, CD player or an iPod on low volume. (Note that I say “relaxing”, for some physicians feel that anxiety over tinnitus makes the situation worse.)

Hearing Conservation

Knowing how loud noises can damage the ear and possibly set off tinnitus, I have gotten defensive about preserving hearing. I have walked out of concerts where the decibel level was high to the point of pain. I now carry ear plugs to be used at the movies, especially during Coming Attractions, where the decibel level seems set by teens whose own hearing has already been impaired by their MP3 players.

So yes, I am the Hearing Patrol of the family. My mantra: Turn it down! When a grandchild is in the back seat listening to an iPod through her earbuds and you in the front can hear her music, it’s time for the Hearing Patrol to spring into action.

Yes, I am probably perceived as the hearing nag, but better that than having the next generation grow frogs in their ears. 

The Way We Were (And Are)

Gerontology is the study of older adults and what a trip that field has been for this geezer! I went to gerontology school when I was in my sixties, the oldest person ever to get an MA in Gerontology at USC.

            Usually, young people study older people---20 somethings trying to understand the elders of the tribe. Each beginning gero student is like a young Margaret Mead doing anthropology work in a foreign land, The Land of Age. But I was the foreigner in the group, an indigenous population of one, the only degree candidate who was Socially Secured and Medicared. I studied what I was. They studied what they were going to be. I think I had more fun, already swimming in the surf they could only look at from the shore.

One Shining Memory: The Peak Experience

            Though the scholastic training was great and comprehensive, it didn’t and couldn’t catch all the experiences of aging in the academic net. There are things about being old that aren’t in text books.

Example: each older person’s enduring memory of a lifetime’s peak experience, an indelible image that has been burnished bright by faithful remembering over the decades. I think everybody over the age of 60 carries a proud and often secret recollection of a special moment in life, one that defines who they were and what they loved.

For my mate, Cranky Pants, it’s the time he first flew solo. For others, it’s the time they sang in the Civic Light Opera, or the time they taught school children in a foreign land. Or maybe it was the time they fought forest fires, or the day of the great earthquake when they went through the neighborhood shutting off the gas of people too panicked to find their own wrenches. Often the peak experience required bravery, the overcoming of fears, performance that was beyond the demands of everyday experience.

Whatever it was, the experience of remembering this one special time nourishes the self-esteem of older people whose pride can be eroded by the downers of aging. When people can’t hear, see or move well or even put on their socks, their pride leaks out. The self-esteem balloon loses a little air. So the recollection of a special moment serves to bolster the self-image, to guard against the erosion of a healthy ego.

And So???

And so if you are older and the proud owner of A Memorable Moment, I’d suggest that you not only secretly cherish it, but you display and enjoy any tangible reminder of your experience. Expand the pleasure of remembering with a photograph, a citation, a recording---any shred of physical evidence that you have been there and done that. And find someone who will listen to your story and tell you theirs---equal time to each proud moment.

Sometimes, though, people want to keep their memories to themselves or just share it with blood brothers. I know someone whose personal claim to fame is enjoying three liaisons in one day---his personal best---but you can bet he is not telling his grandchildren.

Giving Comfort to The Elders

One way to bring pleasure to older adults is to listen to their stories and if they repeat the same one too often---ask them to talk about other memorable moments of their lives:

What was the scariest time? Or the thing they most remember about mom or dad? What do they most want younger people in the family to know? To do? Do they have a legacy ideal they want to leave behind? What are their most treasured objects?

Last, though I don’t know the source, here’s a pertinent thought I wrote down and carry around in my wallet: “To love people is to sing the song that is in their hearts and to sing it to them when they have forgotten”.

Really, How Old Are You?

How about making a guess today? Polish up your crystal ball and tell me what age group is most unhappy.

            Some might answer that older people have to be the least happy. After all, if they are retired, they are unemployed with the loss of income and status that comes from the workplace. And what’s more, judging by their behavior, older people evidently have to be in bed by nine. It’s life in the dull lane, bored into unhappiness.

Actually, though, surveys show that older people are as happy as young people. Imagine that. It’s the middle-aged who are the least happy and no wonder. They have more obligations than any other age group. Think kids, jobs and foreclosing mortgages.

            So the idea that older people are crying into their beer (or Ensure) is, in general, a myth. But what makes older people happy?

A Look at Senior Self-Perceptions

            A recent study spotlights one reason we older folks aren’t down in the dumps about aging. We think we are much younger than we are. In a study published in the Journals of Gerontology, over 500 people 70 and older were asked how old they felt they were. On average, they felt about 13 years younger than their chronological age.

            And rather than take a one-moment-in-time snapshot of people’s attitudes, the study tracked perceptions about age and satisfaction with the aging process over a six-year period---this to find what changes might come to pass over time. Well, the perception of age stayed pretty steady over the years.  In other words, if a person felt 13 years younger at 70, he or she was likely to still feel 13 years younger at 76.

            And note that the question asked was very specific: “How old do you feel when you look at yourself in the mirror?” That a mirror was mentioned made the results even more amazing: if you asked me how old I felt when looking in a mirror, I’d have to account for the wrinkles in my answer and would have to up my number. These people had the same dilemma when asked to reflect on their reflections---and yet they still felt 13 years younger.

            Now, if you left the mirror out of the question---if you ignored the visual clues---and just asked how old people felt, you might get an even more amazing answer. I’ll bet they’d say they felt even younger than 13 years. In fact, I have read other studies that placed the perception level at 15 years younger than chronological age.

Kids, Try This At Home!            

Heck, you can try this experiment on yourself. Without looking in a mirror, how old do you feel? Then, when looking in a mirror, how old do you feel? Is there a difference? What is it?

I Make Me Feel So Young

Now, when it came to the study, was there a gender difference? Yes, indeed. Men saw themselves as four years younger than women who were their age equals. The investigators could only guess at the reason. Maybe women were trained over a lifetime to look more closely at their physical appearances and so were more realistic in their assessments. Or, one could say unkindly that men were more delusional about their actual age, which, if true, could account for older guys going after all those young trophy wives.

Bottom line: Nobody knows.

What Drags Down the Cheery View

            The researchers found that getting sick was likely to make people think of themselves as older. So staying well is a key to maintaining a pleasant illusion about our actual age. But then you already knew that. Nothing makes a person feel older than being marooned in a hospital bed or diagnosed with a geezer-related illness.

More research in this study---the Berlin Aging Study---indicates that “people who feel younger are less likely to die than those who don’t, given the same level of chronological age and equivalent physical health”.

So maybe thinking we are younger than we are is more than a pleasant illusion. It may be a life-saver.

Me, today I feel 50, but my knees are having an 80^th birthday party down below my belt. 

Grammy Knew Best

You know, the old folks at home had it right about health. Grandmothers back then were doctors in housecoats, and though we today think we own the advanced ideas about nutrition, my grandma knew as much in 1948 as many of us today, even though we are overfed on dietary info.

My grandma “got” the fact that fish and fish oils could help keep a family healthy. That’s why, like many Americans back then, cod liver oil was part of our daily diet. So were sardines---many, many cans of sardines. Sardines on Ritz crackers---that was the blue plate lunch special in Grandma’s Kitchen, with a side of tomato soup for a veggie blast.

Walking Her Talk

But gram didn’t just know what should be done, she did it and made us do it too. You swallowed your cod liver oil and your black strap molasses--no questions allowed.

Today, though, while many of us know what to do, we don’t do it and we don’t make our families do it. Our talk about health may be just show. If little Jason doesn’t like the veggies or fish that we oldsters know he should eat, he may be allowed to exist on burgers, fries and “juice” boxes full of sugar water.

Well, we had to eat what we were served and in an era of food scarcity, it made survival sense. The rule was: Eat it, no substitutions. Hating the globbiness of oyster stew, I was once made to sit at the table by myself for the hour it took to get that stew down.

Vitamin D and The Art Deco Grandmother

And it wasn’t just on the food front that my grandmother and others in the 1930’s showed some health smarts. Though today we are told the sun is our enemy---think skin cancer----the grannies and moms of yesterday used to put babies out to nap in the sun. Look at family photos from the Depression and you may see a diapered ancestor getting a Vitamin D bath outside in her baby carriage.

While I would not take sides on the sunning issue—not enough evidence  on benefits (Vitamin D and nature’s anti-depressant) versus drawbacks (skin cancer, sunburn)--- I do know that the women of yore were onto the sunshine vitamin and saw that children got it in short daily sunbaths.

The Gospel of Gram on Preserving Health

It was also gram’s goal to keep us from getting “run down”. Run down meant you didn’t eat right, spent too much time in the house reading the funnies and above all, didn’t go to bed early enough to get a good night’s sleep. Early to the mattress was the rule or you might get health cooties like colds.

Well, it took over 60 years for scientists to catch up to grandmother. This month a new study concluded that a lack of sleep was related to catching a cold. Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the investigation involved 153 men and women who were sequestered in a hotel for two weeks while cold viruses were stuck up their noses.

 But and however, only 35% of those exposed to the virus got a cold. The amount of sleep was the key to the puzzle. Those who got less sleep were five and a half times more likely to be sick than those who caught more dreamtime.

Grandma would be heartened to see that after 60 years, scientists have caught up with her. Really, scientists could have saved time and trouble and just asked my grandmother, who might have sent them to bed without supper for wasting money on something that was as plain as a sardine on a cracker.

Simple Answers to the Health Care Mess

I have a down-to-earth solution to the health care crisis in the US.

 In two words, it’s broccoli and sneakers.

Maybe I’d better explain or better yet, let Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy and Andrew Weil explain it for me. These four champions of holistic lifestyles recently nailed their views to the cathedral door in a Wall Street Journal article claiming that so-called alternative, holistic medicine was now mainstream and it was the drug-reliant, surgery-happy establishment medicine that is questionable today.

OK, they were more dilplomatic—and they really are for integrating mainstream medicine that works with alternative modes that work---such as meditation and herbs. But they and other experts today are making a strong case for preventing illness in the first place through lifestyle changes such as a good diet---that’s the broccoli---and exercise---those are the sneakers.

 Still, people have trouble believing that such simple affordable things can keep them out of the hospital and out of medical trouble, but it’s true. As the four experts say: “The evidence is mounting that diet and lifestyle are the best cures for our worst affllictions.” And one of their goals is to move the US medical system from disease care to real health care and disease prevention. It’s cheaper, safer and it works. What else could we ask for?

The High Cost of Staying Stuck Where We Are

So why are Americans coughing up almost $100,000 for each coronary bypass procedure to the combined tune of 44 billion dollars a year? And why do we pay close to $50,000 for each angioplasty to the combined cost of 60 billion a year?

Because we don’t believe simple prevention works? Because lifestyle change takes a little thought? It is, after all, easier to open a package of chips than to steam veggies---easier to push buttons on the remote than to push oneself to walk.

Me, I don’t know all the blocks to health behaviors that work, but thanks to recent studies, I do know what mostly doesn’t work, at least when it comes to heart health.

(Prepare to be surprised.)

What doesn’t work are expensive, invasive operations on the cardio system. Here are the facts as published in the New England Journal of Medicine and summarized by the four health professionals in their Journal article: Angioplasties and stents “do not prolong life or even prevent heart attacks in stable patients (i.e., the 95% of people who receive them). Coronary bypass surgery prolongs life in less than 3% of patients who receive it.”’

Wow. We don’t get what we are paying for.

So I think it’s time to stop the stupid behavior, especially mine own. For me now, it’s a half hour a day of exercise of any kind and 5 to 9 servings of fruit and veggies, no matter how many faces Cranky Pants makes about plants on his plate. (Tip: if you have juice for breakfast and heap your cereal with a cup of fruit—think berries and bananas---you have 3 servings in the bag before lunch.)

What To Expect From Barack

You already know. Barack exercises most mornings and reportedly eats salmon, broccoli and brown rice for dinner. The prez is tuned in.

Me, I expect future programs where health is rewarded and incentives put in place to behave ourselves health-wise. And, looking at the future high costs of Medicare and the fact the Feds are broke, I ask myself what will happen if taxpayers begin to wonder why they should subsidize older people with bad dog lifestyles who incur high medical expense through Medicare. Our kids may grab the cookies out of our very hands so they don’t have to subsidize our heart surgeries.

So, bottom line, isn’t it time to bypass the bypass?

As I said, broccoli and sneakers.

Holidays: The Debriefing

                So pour yourself another cuppa and think how you spent the last month. Compare it to the other Decembers of your life. Can you see a holiday trajectory? An evolution of holiday habits? Or are you still doing the same things in December that you did at 25 or 50?

 If you are old enough for Social Security, you may have morphed into a new holiday phase, semi-retired now from some of the hoo-ha and from the merry slavery over a hot stove.  Example: Many of us geezers have passed on the turkey platter to younger members of the family. Let them bake the turkey with the giblets still inside. You’ve been there and done that and a lot more you’d rather not tell Martha Stewart about.

Looking back on the recent holidays and those not so recent, it seems to me that holiday behaviors do change over the years.  When you live long enough to have hung stockings by the chimney with care for 6, 7 or 8 decades, the thrill wears a little thin, especially when the cookies and milk are still there in the morning.

Truth to tell, some of us over 50 have pulled back on parties and cooking, cut back on cards stuffed over-long letters and stifled the urge to give little gifts to anything that moves, including the dog and the cat. It’s not that Scrooge is our hero. It’s that we have less energy and probably less disposable income to play the Santa that used to be us.

 Me, I can no longer haul in a 12-foot tree, put it up reliably, find the decorations, untangle the lights, decorate, sweep up the needles, keep it watered and pull the whole scene apart again the first week of January…to say nothing of feeling guilty about mucking up the town gutters with my dead pine tree.

And over-the top celebrations can put older folks under the weather. Think massive winter colds. Think Yule Flu. We don’t have the resilience we used to have when we stayed up to 2 AM assembling toys with the wrong screwdriver.

And holidays with too many bells and whistles now seem extravagant, especially to those who lived through the deprivations of the Depression when there was not enough money for a tree or a present. Many older people lived like Tiny Tim back then, goose-less and gift-less. Not a GI Joe or Hot Wheels in sight.

With all these things in mind, I’d argue that it’s perfectly reasonable to leave the heavy holiday lifting to our now adult children. (Think of it as revenge for the times they didn’t help with the holidays, but bolted as soon as they came home from college to go off and have clandestine keggers with their friends.)

And next time, if, after celebrating a bit with family and best friends---(that thrill is still there)---we then want a little time to be quiet, listen to Bing and send out for a pizza on Christmas Eve, be tolerant.

Even Santa hits retirement age.

Crystal-Balling the Year Ahead: Geezer Version

             Tongue planted firmly in cheek, I offer a crystal-ball guess about the aging scene in 2009:

January…The AARP begins the New Year by declaring that seventy is the new twenty.

February… The feds announce that Medicare will not cover Botox injections, this despite intense lobbying from fast-wrinkling Boomers. Angelina Jolie’s lips stage a protest.

March… The Big Two automakers arrive in Washington with the specifics of their rescue plan. They want to extend Medicare to old and ailing car companies. 

April….BigPharmCo recalls its arthritis pill, SleezeEase, because, despite black box warnings and the small print in TV commercials, some people actually took the drug and actually kind of expired from it. The FDA says it’s it not responsible, but will do better with the next black box drug that they will also not be responsible for.

May…. President Obama adds money to the CIA’s Viagra for Afghanistan program, whereby the allegiance of warlords is obtained by giving them little blue pills in exchange for information. This Erections for Victory program was started by the Bush administration and if you don’t believe this actually happened, google: Viagra Afghanistan. Better bribery through chemistry. Really.

June… Pain in the Prostate Month. The national poster boy is Gary Tenducci, 65, of Winnetka IL who managed to visit the small room 154 times in just one night.

July…The stock market goes into a summer dive with the Dow Jones staging another showboat meltdown. Investment advisors across the country tell retirees to hold their stocks, as “the market will eventually come back”. Seniors advise their advisors that they don’t expect to live to be 116.

August…Social Security recipients get another cost of living raise, but the government takes an ever-larger hunk out of each monthly check----typically $48 for shipping and handling, $102 for fair share contribution to assorted bailouts and $424 for prescription drug insurance, which was initially offered at $42, but---oh well. If any older adult is not satisfied with the check or with the government cooperating with bait-and-switch insurance companies, he or she may return the check to the US Treasury, no questions asked.

September… Seniors notice that the donut hole in their prescription coverage has gotten so large, it’s all hole and no donut. Millions protest by dumping their meds down the sink, thereby insuring that all the households on the town water systems are protected from heart disease and arthritis. The federal government, looking at the improved public health statistics, considers using Universal Drug Dumps as one way to get health care for all. The Secretary of Health, Education and Promises described the phenomenon as “a great big Boston Tea Party with a good medical outcome. What’s not to like?”

October…will be the first month that the S&P 500 goes lower than the temperature outside. Senior citizens across the country stage a protest by driving very slowly on freeways. Other drivers don’t notice anything new.

November….is Sunset Supper Month, when restaurants all over the country offer early bird dinners consisting of a wide-ranging menu of turkey with giblet gravy and turkey with giblet gravy.

December…Bing Crosby’ s rendition of White Christmas is digitally re-mastered into Green Christmas and everybody gives and gets solar-powered appliances. Small children receive training windmills as gifts to introduce them to clean energy. But all the grandparents are happy because their shopping was done in the pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-holiday super stimulus sales that started in May.

On New Year’s Eve 2009, the lights go on all over the world. This celebratory surge trips off the electrical grid. Five billion TV sets go dark which insures a high birth rate in September 2010. Senior citizens deny any responsibility. Seventy is not the new twenty. 

The Gratitude of Geezers

     Have the holidays cooked your goose? Are you fatigued, burned-out and down in the dumps? Now do you understand Scrooge better than you understand Tiny Tim?

These are all symptoms of Post-Holiday Stress Syndrome and if they describe you, here is a quick rundown of blessings to pat your attitude back into shape for the new year.

Things to be thankful for, or why we older adults are lucky ducks:

 * The move to privatize Social Security ended up in the political trash heap. Aren’t you glad? At this writing, the stock market is down around 40% for the year.  That dull old Social Security check never looked so good.

* The longevity revolution. The people in the US have picked up about 30 extra years of life in the last 100 years. Those smallpox vaccinations and various shots plus public health measures such as clean water systems have worked their magic. Now you and I might grow old enough to meet our great grandchildren before we meet Our Maker.

* The bionic geezer. Through the courtesy of titanium and various plastics, we can get our parts replaced when they wear out. So when bones break down, in we go to the body shop for repairs. Joint replacements keep many of us active and out of wheelchairs. Our grandparents didn’t have this medical luxury.

* Medicare. Some take this program of medical care and hospitalization for granted, but if every age group in the country had the medical coverage we older people do, we’d finally have health care for all. So here’s to extending the honor.

* Help with hearing. It’s no fun to lose your hearing, but the many kinds of hearing aids now available can put people back in touch with their lives, their mates and their TV sets. (Note: if you think Wolf Blitzer is mumbling, get a hearing test.)

* Help with seeing. Many blessings upon the eye care experts and the cataract surgeons. Eye care is miraculous now and here’s just one personal example:  If you have cataracts as I once did, the world can look like the brown-varnished paintings of the Old Masters. So imagine going in for cataract surgery and coming out to find the world really isn’t a Rembrandt painting. It’s brighter. Much more Matisse.

* New attitudes about retirement. Old notions of retiring to Bingoland are being replaced by ideas of unretirement, of switching to new careers and finding new passions. We don’t have to go out to pasture anymore.

* New attitudes about physical ability. The idea that older people belong in rocking chairs is being replaced by the idea that we belong on hiking trails, in gyms or competing in senior class athletics.

* The advent of the Internet and Google. The whole world is now ours to access. Just for starters, Google can help people search for a rental, make air and land reservations, look up medical info, find a classmate, a recipe, a book, a fact, or a lover. You can start and run a business online, visit faraway places and find any number of new friends. Also, email keeps you in touch with the people you love. So, almost anything you want is available----literally at your fingertips. Even pizza and honey-baked ham.

*  This newspaper. Be thankful for The Union. It is one of the few papers that value older people enough to run a column especially for them. Even better, I find that all ages read this column, either to see what it’s like to grow older or to find information to share with their parents. Also, speaking of forward-looking media, many thanks to KVMR-FM, they who give me the opportunity to host the on-air version of Second Wind at 89.5. Not many community radio stations cover the far side of life.

Last, thanks to all who read this column every week. You fix my PHSS, my holiday burnout. And what better cure than to have people appreciate what you do? 

So, Happy New Year to geezers and geezers-in-training everywhere. 

Holiday: Version 2008

            It is the best of times and the worst of times. Most of all, it’s the weirdest of times. Who of us will forget 2008? It was the year of millionaires with limited means, a year when comedians took on serious political issues and politicians provided the comedy. Everything seemed back-asswards which tells me there’s only one way to set things right: Forget it all and celebrate the holidays with your family.

But wait! Weird things are happening there too. While the adults gather round the Yule log, the young people sit in the corner going tap, tap, tap. No, it’s not the sound of Santa’s workshop. It’s the sound of their little fingers texting away on their cell phones.

Here We Go A’Texting

Just so you’ll know what’s going on with the young people at the family gatherings this year, texting is sending short print messages from one cell phone to the screen of another cell phone. A message to ask about another’s welfare may come through as:  r u ok?

Text messages can be sent and received without a parent or grandparent hearing a ring. The real tipoff to what’s going on are the kids’ flying thumbs on the keyboard of a cell phone. Today’s youngsters know how to speed type at an astonishing rate with just their thumbs. But no surprise here. Their parents have Blackberries implanted in their thumbs,

Your Role as a Texting Chaperone

So what does texting mean to you as an older adult in the family holiday circle? Two things:

First, you should ask for a demo so you can see what the whippersnappers are up to these days. You don’t want to wander through life as a clueless geezer. While you are at it, ask them to show and tell you about Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blogging and social networking. These things are the new form of online culture, the social lifeblood of your descendants. As your great-grandparents once socialized at quilting bees, barn raisings and square dances, your grandkids are getting together on their cell phones and computers.

Then the second thing: make a rule that’s in effect, not only on holidays, but whenever you get together. The rule is: No texting during meals. Also, no cell phones at the table, no electronic games, no listening to iPods. (Be alert: this can be done secretly with earbuds hidden under the hair.)

Bottom line: The focused presence of your young family members is requested. Nay, required. And so beginneth another lesson in family conversation---you know, talking to each other. And one sure way to get the attention of younger people is to begin telling stories about their parents. Better still, start telling stories on their parents.

Tips & Tricks

One good icebreaker at these semi-formal holiday meals: put a family photo or memento at each place. A old report card, a drawing, a vintage wind-up toy, a third grade class picture---I’ve used all of these and everybody gets a kick out of a nostalgic blast from the past.

Then sometime after dinner, call in the family computer expert, someone who is probably between the ages of 6 and 18, and have him or her clean up your hard drive, defrag your files and get you an up-to date browser. These young, very cool, very smart whizzes can help grandparents float on the rising waters of technology and keep us from digitally drowning.

I see this tech help as random acts of grandchild kindness. It’s enough to make me forgive them for texting their way through my yearly rendition of the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. 

Dealing With Dark December

Baby, it’s dark outside. December does that to the light----which means it’s time to deck the halls with signs of seasonal affective disorder. Also on the psychological menu this season: CNN-induced depression and/or adrenaline fatigue brought on by too close an association with Mr. Dow and Mr. Jones. Whatever they’ve got, it’s catching.

But here’s my favorite inoculation for all of the above: Coziness, administered daily.

Am I crazy? A prescription for coziness? If I am nuts, entire cultures are crazy too. Take the Danes for instance. They have a word, hygge---pronounced hue-ga---that means coziness, warmth, togetherness, intimacy and happiness. And they know how to produce hygge. They have to. Denmark is so north, so dark in the winter and so in need of a bracing shot of the jollies come December.

In fact, I think the reason the jolliest holidays of the Northern Hemisphere were plopped into the middle of the darkest days of the year is the human longing  for coziness and comfort in the face of a disappearing sun. And, call me crazy again, but I think there’s a reason August has no jolly holiday. We’re so up after a summer full of sunshine, we don’t need the cultural uppers of official holidays. The sun does it for us.

Cozy Lessons

            Now some of us have an outstanding talent for creating an environment that is cheerful to the max. Others can use a few tips. Our homes aren’t dungeons, but we can use ideas about how to put psychological sandbags around the house to keep the downers from seeping in. 

            Here are just a few ways to achieve hygge:

            * Shut off the TV news. It highlights murders, fires, bombs, fear, imagined depressions and too many ads for Flomax. Read a good book instead. Do a hobby by the fire. Watch an old movie on TMC. Cook comfort food while listening to great music. Try meatloaf, shepherd’s pie, stew or hot soup.

* More light. Have breakfast by candlelight in the kitchen. Have a favorite lamp with an energy efficient bulb on a timer so it’s lit when you get up in the morning or get in at night. (The light can also keep you from tripping and falling on your whatsis.)

If you have seasonal affective disorder, get out in the sunshine, but also investigate the special bulbs and light boxes that combat winter downer moods.

            * Teas and other comfort beverages. Tea is my salvation as it was for the generations of women before me, all of whom thought any problem could be solved over a cup of Lipton’s. Tea-maker Stash has a great lemon ginger tea and Celestial Seasonings weighs in with a gingerbread spice holiday tea as well as another offering called Sleepytime Extra, the extra being 25 mg. of valerian, nature’s soothing herb.

            * Music. An instant mood modifier and relaxer, music is central to coziness. If you don’t have a sound system, turn on your cable TV and find the music channels. And there is always the favorite medium of us geezers, the radio. Or take an iPod to bed tonight…Sinatra on your pillow.

            * Keep warm. This is obvious to the level of duh, but there are people in my family who sit around in the winter shivering, no socks, shoes or slippers, no warm wraparound in which to watch TV.  At least it’s obvious what to give them as gifts---fuzzy slippers and adult blankies.

            Though it is not now fashionable, wearing warm hats inside makes sense because hats conserve body heat. Remember The Night Before Christmas with “momma in her kerchief and I in my cap”? Inside hats worked then. They work now. Ask Santa for a cashmere watch cap.

So now, please---you stay all cozy, especially if you are keeping the thermostat down to save energy. And you don’t have to spend a lot of money to buy new warm clothing. In fact---this is where I am crazy---in my home office, I use a mink stole I bought for ten bucks at a garage sale to keep warm while I write---very charming over a bathrobe. And I have a down bed jacket I bought at a consignment shop. I may not look chic, but honey, I am hygge.

            And the same to you. 

The One Thing in the World You Can Control: You

I know. You need some good news. So do I. Here’s a little early present for both of us:

It’s known that much stress comes from feeling we have little or no control of what happens around us. The year 2008 certainly fills that bill. So would you like something you can control for the better, something that will help you now and in the future and something that will save our poor-relation government billions of dollars? Me, too.

Which gets me to a subject that sounds dull, but is really central to the health and well-being of many and that’s knowing what pre-diabetes is and what simple little steps you can take to control it and prevent it from turning into a big problem with the big D…Diabetes.

The Big D can result in kidney failure, blindness, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and poor circulation, nerve damage, foot problems and skin disorders---a rotten menu. And just as bad is the fact that the rate of Type-2 diabetes is rising rapidly----from 4.5 cases per 1000 people in 1995-1997 to 9.1 cases per 1,000 people by 2007, the apparent cause being rising rates of obesity.

That’s more than doubling the cases of adult onset diabetes in 10-12 years. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention calls it an epidemic. Health care experts say if we just could cut the number of new cases in half, we could save Uncle Sam (and our tax-paying selves) billions.

So here’s how to stay out of the negative statistics:

First, How Do You Know If You’re Pre-Diabetic?

If your doctor has said you have high blood sugar, borderline diabetes, impaired glucose tolerance or impaired fasting glucose, you may be in the land of pre-diabetes. According to the CDC, 25 % of us are pre-diabetic, but only 4 percent of us have been diagnosed. So one first step is to talk to your doc about getting your blood sugar levels tested to see where you are.

Even without testing, much is known about who is at risk: people who are overweight and who don’t exercise. But and however, just a few small changes in eating habits and a few doable steps towards being more active will lower your risk of diabetes. That is the good news. It doesn’t take all that much to stay safe.

The National Diabetes Education Program puts out an excellent brochure on how to prevent Type-2 diabetes. Their message is hopeful: “Diabetes prevention is proven, possible and powerful”. And doable in a real world. As the brochure says, you don’t have to knock yourself out to prevent diabetes.

 Just get 30 minutes of brisk walking or other moderate intensity physical activity 5 days a week. Grab a chatty friend and go for a gab walk. Go by yourself and talk to Mother Nature. Dance around in front of the TV set. (Yes, that’s me dancing around in front of Turner Movie Classics and I am certainly glad Spencer Tracy can’t see me.)

As for weight loss, it’s been proven that just losing 5 to 7 percent of your weight, if you are overweight, can make a positive difference that will prevent or delay the onset of the disease. For a 200-pound person, that means just 10 to 14 pounds off.

All of us have our favorite way to peel off the pounds. Readers of the medical columnist, Dr. Peter Gott, swear by his No Flour, No Sugar Diet. Others concentrate on cutting out saturated fats and avoiding buttery desserts and the fatty meats and fatty skins of poultry. Still others just shave their portions down a fourth. Some cut out the alcohol or switch from a donut breakfast to oatmeal and fruit. Many take doggie bags home after a large restaurant meal rather than over-stuffing themselves at a single sitting All the above are good, but starving yourself is not. Fill up on the good stuff and you won’t have room for the bad.

More Help

            For many more ideas on how to stay out of trouble, get the publication, Small Steps, Big Rewards, from the National Diabetes Education Program. Call 1-800-438-5383 or go to www.ndep.nih.gov and click on the Small Steps logo.

            Last, though the brochure doesn’t suggest it, I count running around to various stores in full holiday shopping mode as moderate physical exercise, especially on the day after Thanksgiving. So go for the goods and be well.            

Old Dogs Break Old Rules

Is it too late for you? Are you an old dog who can’t learn a new trick? Are   you rusted out? Too far gone to pursue a new career or engrossing pastime?

            Never. Never. Never. I don’t care how old you are. Only dead is too late. Alive is not.

As author Barbatra Sher says, it’s only too late if you don’t start now. So if you have submerged dreams or a yen to play the piano, write a book, start a home business or splash in watercolors, go for it now.

Sher contends there is some way to pursue what interests you no matter what your age or experience. OK, at 65, you can’t become the world’s best downhill skier, but you could probably have fun doing cross-country skiing. If you want to make movies, you may not win an Oscar, but could have a good time making videos.

And you don’t have to be good at what you do. Now’s the time to forget the old burden of competition. You can be so-so as a painter, photographer or whatever you choose. No matter your skill level, the idea is to have fun and to avoid being the victim of the myth about old dogs. We ancient canines can learn to sit up, shake hands and even catch Frisbees.

Don’t believe me? Let me ply you with examples and, at the risk of being thought an egomaniac, I’ll start with myself because it’s the example I know best.

Was It Too Late For Me?

In my mid-sixties, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, but I did know retirement wasn’t for me. Seemed like a sentence to 30 years of hard boredom. And I knew the possibilities of later life did interest me. So I went back to school and got an MA in gerontology, the study of older people. At USC, It took two years and the investment of a $20,000 dollar legacy, which now looks like a better investment than sticking that inheritance into stocks.

And, back in 2000 when I started on this path, I wrote myself a seemingly impossible list of what I wanted to accomplish as a geezer:  get a good grounding in gerontology at USC, write a column for older people, write a book and host a radio show for the same audience. Eight years later, I host a radio show, Second Wind, on KVMR. I write this column, had my book, Hot Granny, published by Chronicle Books and am working on another book now. It was only too late if I didn’t start then.

Other Late Bloomers

Locally, I know of a superb woodworker, ‘”retired” Bill Kinney, who started less than two years ago and is turning out museum-quality wood pieces. And then there are “retired” Mike and Margaret Bloebaum, whose new production company, MB2 Communications, just finished a video that is part of Chanticleer’s new holiday DVD set, Mission Road. (Chanticleer is a world-famous singing group from San Francisco whose performances sell out when Music in the Mountains presents them here.)

If finding a second career intrigues you, check out www.encore.org. Their theme? Finding work that matters in the second half of life. They offer tools to decipher your strengths and turn them into a new career. And you can read the real life stories of others who did the same.

More Help

Barbara Sher is a master at getting people off their duffs and into their dreams. Her book, Wishcraft, gave me inspiration and practical tools to do what I wanted, but any of her books, PBS tapes or live seminars will help. Her website is www.barbarasher.com. Other Sher books: It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now and I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was.

So never give up on yourself or your own possibilities. Inside that old dog is a puppy wagging its tail to get out.

What Will You Do With the Rest of Your Life?

             

I want to live long enough to get frequent flier miles from Social Security.

Yes, longevity is the gift we get from life in the 21^st century. Our ancestors kicked the bucket before they lived long enough to worry about bad knees or hot flashes. But now, medical advances can keep us going into the 80’s and 90’s.

This gift of time means different things to different people. To some it means no more 9 to 5. To others, it’s a chance to gloat over the obituaries of those who once did you wrong. That’s a guilty pleasure of ageing---surviving longer than the school bully or the ex-mate.

Further meditating on the benefits of survival, some of us older women have even decided it’s darned lucky we didn’t turn out to be Princess Grace or Princess Diana. Look what happened to them.

            However, isn’t there more to longevity? Besides leaving a stressful workplace and being grateful that we have lasted longer than some others, what are the extra years for? In the words of Robert Butler, why survive?

Encouraging the Young and Clueless

            Well, a long life can take many shapes, but to me it’s a chance to mentor the young people in the family, the grandchildren. That sounds obvious today---older people encouraging the young---but early mortality worked its wormy way in my family and I really knew only one grandparent out of four “real” grandparents and two step-grandparents. One out of six.  

Grandma Lucy, it was good to know ye, but I sure as shooting wish I knew the other five. Think of the examples and inspiration I missed up close and personal, to say nothing of the cupcakes left unmade and uneaten.

Helping The Kids

            If mentoring is your bag, begin by showing visible appreciation for the chance to know and enjoy your descendants. And that doesn’t mean just giving presents or showing up for cameo appearances on holidays. It means getting to know each child as a person who is not like any other small human and then encouraging that child to develop his/her innate skills.

The world tends to shove people into molds, to file down the square pegs to fit round holes, so one thing a grandparent can do is encourage the peg to find its own shape. Which is why I’ve posted this saying on my fridge for the family to see:

“Be who you is, because if you is who you ain’t, you ain’t who you is.”

That’s attributed to pitcher Satchel Page, but no matter who said the words, they highlight one of the main roads to happiness in life---having the courage to be who you really are. And though I seem full of quotes today, I can’t resist repeating an idea from Anne Morrow Lindbergh: that the most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

And that is what happens---exhaustion---when a peg lives in the wrong hole. So do what you can to detect the innate talents of your grandchildren and to help them along the road of expressed personal ability.

How to show them various possibilities? You can take them to your former workplace or to witness any business or profession at work. My step-dad took me to a courtroom to encourage me to be an attorney. (It didn’t take.) Or try handing them just the right video, or give an appropriate book. Or you could help pay tuition so they can take a class in computers, film-making, art, music or anything else.

Fostering The Inner Retailer

Taking my grandchildren to garage sales introduced them to the profitable sideline of auctioning their sidewalk purchases on eBay and also selling them at their lemonade stand. Drinks & Antiques! They learned to deal with the public, market fairly and sell effectively.

            I confess it can be a challenge to find the inner abilities of all twelve of our grandkids, but sometimes they surprise us and say right out where they want to place their peg. We have a thirteen-year-old granddaughter who wants to be a banker---but that was before the meltdown, so I am checking back. Meanwhile, I’m hoping she won’t ask for a bailout.

Veggiephilia: Why We Should Love Edible Plants

Talking one way, walking another---that’s hypocrisy---and it always belongs to somebody else. But I began to suspect I was not doing everything I could to walk my talk when I discovered the person eating too much junk food was me.

Boy, that’s not the way to become a healthy old geezer----which is, after all, one of the main points of this column. I want all of us, including moi---to live long enough to get to that low three figure birthday—100.

            Where I most fell down was on a banana peel: I didn’t eat enough fruit and also, I ate too few veggies, even when these garden gifts have tested out to be protective against so many health glitches that I could use the rest of the column telling how edible plants provide antioxidants, help hearts, arteries, blood pressure, eyesight, etc.           

             So, writing what I needed to learn myself, last week’s column targeted the glories of fruits and veggies (F & V), foods you’ve been hearing about for years, but maybe haven’t done much about. The usual recommended range is 5-9 servings a day. That sounds impossible, until you realize that a serving is just a half-cup----4 ounces---and that if you wanted to hit a target of 8 servings a day, you’d just have to visualize 4 cups of goodies going down your hatch over a 24-hour period.

Daily Organizing for F & V

            Here’s how I’m trying to reach the fruit and vegetable goal in my house:

Breakfast---3 servings: whole grain cereal with two kinds of fruit, maybe ½ cup of bananas and ½ cup berries from the freezer, plus one small glass of fruit juice.

Lunch--2 servings: Soup ‘n salad---the soup having lots of veggies. Lazy, I often use low-salt canned soup or one of the delicious new soups that come in cartons and then I may add shredded carrots, green onions or veggies left over from dinner. Salad: two handfuls of greens.

Afternoon---1 serving: One apple sliced and sitting at the side of my computer for the 3 PM munchies.

Night---2-3 servings: At least 2 side-dish veggies. Sometimes the count can go up to 3 if the main course is chili, or a baked potato stuffed with mushrooms, or whole wheat pasta served with tons of tomato sauce. Another way to add veggies to pasta: throw broccoli florets into the boiling pasta water for the last three minutes.

The refrigerator is stocked with juices---all kinds---including orange, tomato and carrot juices, with grape and apple juices also at the ready. They are better than soda, though I cut the fruit juices with water to keep the sugar count down.

So, yes, it’s possible to go up to eight or nine servings without changing your eating habits that much. The clue is to plan it out everyday and to have goodies in the pantry or freezer for when the fresh stuff runs out. Canned tomatoes and canned fruit in water are better than nothing when the refrigerator looks bare. My freezer also helps. Chopped spinach and frozen blueberries are the stars there.

Then, too, since I am the Queen of Wilted Refrigerator Lettuce, I’ve planted lettuce in a container under the eaves out on the deck, plants which should last as salad fixings until the first frost. I may get more ambitious next spring, plant more veggies, fertilize our fruit trees and become a farmer’s market groupie. And that will be me lurking in the produce section of the market, petting the chard when nobody is looking.

What To Do About Hamburger Man?

I’m cutting back on meat, which could make Cranky Pants (aka Hamburger Man) even crankier if I insisted he do the same. So I don’t, and he has his frozen burgers at hand if he feels carnivorous. And he does like main course dishes of chili, pasta or brown rice, so we have some agreement on menus.

Last, there’s a side benefit of trying to eat like a monkey in a garden.  I weigh less than an elephant. In one week of eating my way towards a one hundredth birthday, I lost 3 pounds.

Same to ya. 

Not The Pig Farm of Eden

I should have figured it out by now---what things to eat. I should have noted what our mammal relatives eat in a state of nature: plants. And then, I should have noticed where God put Adam and Eve when they were starting out. It wasn’t the Corral of Eden or the Pig Farm of Eden, it was the Garden of Eden. That ancient story is a massive PR boost for those who think we should eat mostly plants, not pork butt.

            And lately, knowing I am in the part of life where my expiration date may come up at any time, I’ve been reading a lot. That’s what I do when I get nervous. Other people drink, take drugs, run half-marathons or watch re-runs of MASH. I read. Maybe I think books will protect me from mortality. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, my library card will protect me.

            And I’ve been reading about longevity, about groups of people the world over who live long, vital lives, about folks who are still bopping around in their 90’s, with little or no heart disease or high blood pressure. These folks live in Okinawa, Greece, Italy, rural China and in the mountains of Pakistan.

 Note they do not live in the USA, which ranks a poor 45^th, behind Bosnia, when it comes to longevity---which means we have a lot to learn, especially when we spend more than any other country on heath care. As a clue to a better way, here’s what these long-lived groups have in common when it comes to eating.

Kitchen Secrets of The Really Old

These recommendations for what to eat are a semi-consensus about diet from doctors and nutritionists looking at the effect of food on health and longevity. But some nutrition experts say no oils or fats at all (Dean Ornish), while those in favor of the Mediterranean Diet think olive oil is good. Then still others say no animal food at all. As usual, make up your own mind while keeping to the main findings, the ones experts mostly agree on. Here’s their basic advice to Americans:

Enjoy many more veggies, fruits, salads and whole grains. Cut back on cows and other animals.

Here are the specifics of a longevity diet, gathered and condensed by nutritionist Sally Beare:

* Five to 10 servings of plant-based food a day, mostly vegetables and some fruit. (Just for laughs, how many plants did you eat today?)

* Three to five servings of whole grains---brown rice, whole wheat, oats, etc. (This part is easy---oats for brekkie, a sandwich for lunch and brown rice or whole wheat pasta for dinner.)

* Protein: three to five servings a day. Vegetarians can eat tofu, lentils or legumes. Also recommended: small servings of live yogurt, 3 or 4 organic eggs a week, lean meats in small to moderate amounts (one small serving 3 to 4 times weekly), fish (two or three times weekly.) Note no burgers or trips for a bucket of fried chicken.

* Essential fats: a handful of nuts or seeds, or 1 TBSP cold-pressed nut and seed oils, or fish oil supplements (daily), or oily fish (twice weekly).

* Drinks: Eight glasses of water daily, plus 1 to 5 cups green tea.

* Eat only until you are 8 parts full. Stop before stuffing.

Also, if you wonder what a serving is, imagine a half-cup of sliced strawberries. That’s just four big strawberries equaling a serving of fruit, so the plant-eating goal is not as hard as it sounds.

The other heavy hint from the various longevity studies is to move, move, move. These survivors work outside, garden, walk a lot, and go up and down the steep steps of their village. The village is the gym.

Here are more readings for the curious:

The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health, T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell.

50 Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People, Sally Beare.

Next column: how to actually get more plants into your system without undue suffering, self-righteousness or your burger buddy leaving home for the stockyards of Kansas in order to find someone who understands him. 

Iphone: The Swiss Army Knife of Phones

So I’m almost alone---Cranky Pants is away on family business. But---true confession---I’m cuddled up with something that is not my missing geezer guy. It’s an iPhone, a cottontop’s best new tech buddy. And though it is not target marketed to the 50+ crowd, I think it is the best pocket computer/phone an older person could wish for.

Why? First, it’s senior friendly---easier to use than any cell phone I have yet run into. The touch buttons on the screen are large enough for arthritic fingers, the onscreen messages easier to see and the volume goes high enough so the hearing-challenged can probably hear what’s going on. The rings can be amped up so that they are hard to miss, even when the phone is buried in a garbage-dump handbag like mine.

Way More Than a Cell Phone

But to call this device a cell phone is like saying Paul Newman was just a great pair of blue eyes. The iPhone is a pocket computer that will deliver your email and your newspaper, surf the web, check your stocks and go just about anywhere your desktop can take you. What this means is that if you still have the bucks to do a little traveling, you can stay in touch without lugging a laptop through security or stuffing it under a hotel mattress to keep it from being stolen.

Now I once thought I would never read a newspaper on a computer---wrong. And then I said I would never read a newspaper on a cell phone screen. Wrong again. Just by putting your thumbs on the screen and pulling them apart, you can make the newsprint larger.

So, if the driveway gets icy this winter and I don’t want to go out to pick up the paper, I can read the paper on my iPhone, snug in bed without risking a fall. Yes, I prefer the whole delicious paper object in my hand, but sometimes it’s smart to stay off the ice and in bed.

Traveling Light

On trips, I used to take a travel alarm, a music player, a little radio, a camera and a laptop. Now I just slip the iPhone in my pocket and the charger in my handbag. The alarm is very easy to set, the music player a real boon to air and car travel and a way to get oneself to sleep during a bout of travel insomnia on a strange mattress. The earphones are the first comfortable pair I’ve owned. And if you get lost traveling, there’s a map function.

Streaming radio is yours with several downloadable applications. The favorite du jour seems to be Flycast. And then there is a simple still camera with easy instructions for emailing the photo or deleting if you’ve goofed. Videos, books and podcasts can also be accessed, but I haven’t gotten around to those yet.

There’s more. I’ve turned on the iPhone to see the night table in the dark---a substitute flashlight. I’ve used a function called Notes to write down ideas for these columns. There’s also a calculator---big numbers---a calendar and weather reports. (Call us crazy, but many of us older people not only check our own weather forecasts, we check our kids’ weather to see if the world is raining on them.)

A meaningful endorsement came in last night from tech-wary Cranky Pants, he who got an iPhone to use only as a phone. He called me yesterday to say three of our grade school grandkids taught him how to use the other functions and he is having a ball.

Particulars: The new iPhones cost either $199 or $299 and must be used with the AT&T network. The lowest cost subscription plan is 60 bucks a month, but that includes unlimited use of the Internet. To check out various plans and retail choices, go to www.apple.com/iphone/buy.

I could never have gotten up to speed without the help of David Pogue’s book, iPhone, The Missing Manual. Get the second edition covering the new 3G phone.

Last, I have no financial connection with Apple, but am deeply prejudiced in favor of older adults using new technology to improve their lives, to stay in touch with their families and with the world. Also, if you are low enough to try and curry favor with your grandkids---and I am---just pull out your iPhone next time you see the little darlings.

You will be the bomb, their version of saying you are one cool dude.

Undriving the Driver

What do an eighty-five year old man and a sixteen-year-old boy have in common?

            Two things: Both want the car keys permanently in their possession and both have the highest accident rates of any age groups. But the difference is that the teen’s driving will improve with maturity while older people will continue to experience deterioration in reaction time, in eyesight, hearing, distance perception, night vision and perhaps, if they take certain meds, clarity of consciousness.

When A Driver Loses His Edge

Now there are older people who are excellent drivers---I’d ride with them to hell and back---but there are others who are losing it and refusing to acknowledge the loss. Worse, there are others who have lost it. They get tickets, drive into trees, dent the car, forget their destination and generally worry their family members.

Then comes The Discussion: Isn’t it time for Mom or Dad to give up the car keys? Sometimes, a wise older person can see what’s happening without the family getting into it at all. These smart people just stop driving or restrict driving to the daytime or just to the corner store. Some of them enroll in an AARP course on safe driving, a course specifically directed to improving the skills of older drivers. Others begin to leave the driving to a mate with better eyesight. (One good rule: Whoever can see a person dressed in black, riding a bike without lights at night, should be the driver of choice after the sun goes down.)

But other older people are in complete denial and that’s when family members either step in and have a discussion about driving or if appropriate, confiscate the car keys, thereby insuring they will be left out of the will and not spoken to for months.

Here’s one solution that worked for Cranky Pants and his dad. Dad realized that his driving deteriorated. CP realized Dad wanted to control the car keys. An agreement was made: Dad had the car keys at all times except when he asked a home health aide or a family member to drive him somewhere. Other than the driving time, Dad had the keys. It worked.

Understanding Older People

 But why, you may ask yourself, do older people cling so stubbornly to their driving rights?

For the same reason the teen does: A love of independence. An appreciation of one of our basic freedoms---the freedom to go out.  And an older person has other concerns: who will get the groceries, go to the drugstore or travel to the doctor’s? And what kind of a dive does a social life take if you can’t drive? And how do you get to see your grandchilden’s soccer games without a car?

These and other transportation benefits that younger people take for granted are rightly treasured by older people, who, unless they live in cities, have poor choices when it comes to public transport or the possibility of walking to carry out errands.  So what to do? Here’s a second idea:

A Cost Analysis

How much money does it take to operate a car? For most people, it’s the second highest household expenditure after the mortgage. In some households, the money spent on cars almost equals the money spent on food and medical care combined. 

 So to do a cost analysis, consider the cost of the car, its financing and maintenance, the insurance, the gas, the registration and the costs of parking. Then there’s the fact that a car is a depreciating asset---evaporating money. Add in the parking tickets and the dent removal and that’s a chunk of change spent on transportation.

The calculators at AAA estimate that it now costs .71 cents a mile to own a financed car. If you drive 20,000 miles a year, that $14,200 dollars. Check out the figures for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/3pf2yn.

Fourteen thousand dollars could buy a lot of taxi rides when we can’t drive anymore---to say nothing of lower blood pressure. But few seem to think of the taxi option for older adults, as if it were an extravagance. But as we have seen, it is probably a bargain when compared to owning a car. Yet conventional thinking about this issue seems to end with taking the car away or using an inconveniently scheduled van service.

Me, when I’m 90, I’m calling a cab.

Find more information about dealing with older parents and their cars at http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/01/18/taking.keys.away.

Depression Geezers Speak Up

 

My Inner Swami is AWOL I don’t know what will happen economically and neither do the experts. Recession? Depression? Nothing?

What I still have, though, is that character within: Ms. Worst Case. Yes, I am a worst case planner. I imagine a worst case scenario, figure out how to handle it and then, relax, feeling I am prepared for the worst.

Now, older people can be helpful in these economic times because many remember the worst-case economic scenario, The Great Depression, either as young adults, teens or tots. And we are here as witnesses that a country can live through bad times.

Yes, work was very hard to get and food was sometimes scarce. We could not have second helpings of potatoes. Fresh fruit was an unknown. I practically fainted over a fresh tangerine in a Christmas stocking when I was five years old.  And we were educationally starved. Nobody had money for books and I did not see a book until I went to kindergarten.

So those were some of the downers, but, believe it or not, the Depression had some good things going for it. Even the worst case had silver linings:

Better Family Life: Today, critics see the nuclear family as an isolated unit, living below the poverty line when it comes to family relationships. In the Depression, though, generations often lived together to save on rent. In one small duplex, our grandparents hosted two sons in an unheated attic, a widowed son and his two daughters in one bedroom, my husband-deserted mom on the couch and my brother and me in the grandparents’ room. Ten buddies against the storm. It was a lively home, offering the comfort of relatives, the sharing of tasks and believe it or not, a lot of laughs.

And when generations live together, the youngest learn from the oldest. I hope I learned generosity from my grandmother Lucy. Though we hardly had enough food, when hobos came to the back door looking for dinner, my grammy fed them. And there were lots of hobos who wandered up from the railroad tracks. I think our house had the hobo hieroglyphic that said: Good Stew Here.

Community Togetherness: Again, critics say America has lost its sense of community and is separating into groups that have no common identity. This trend is sometimes called Bowling Alone. Well, in the Depression, almost all the people were in the same economic boat. There wasn’t the huge disparity between the classes that exists now, or if there was one, we didn’t know about it. There was no TV to bring in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

My mom told me everybody she knew brushed their teeth back then with charcoal because no one could afford toothpaste. Didn’t that bother you? I asked. She said no---not that nor any of the other economies because all were practicing the same ones. Those were the days of party lines---several families sharing one phone line---and the excitement of getting hand-me-down clothes. (To this day I prefer gently used clothes to new ones. Someone else suffers through the starch.)

Better environment: We didn’t produce carbon dioxide when we drove because we didn’t drive. We didn’t have a car. We used public transport or walked. As for other energy use, there was no AC. Heating was minimal. My gram once chopped up a dresser to use as firewood on a freezing night. Saved by the furniture—what a story.

Excellent playtimes for kids. We got lots of outdoor exercise. Kick the can, tag, hopscotch, hide and seek, sliding down the sandbank…these kept us active. And there were no toys except sticks and stones and an old tin can but we had lots of fun. Really. Never did I feel deprived, at least not until I got to kindergarten and realized that books existed. Then I learned how to get to the “lie-berry”.

So those are just a few of the great things about the Great Depression and though we may never have another, it’s nice to know that living on a lower level economically does not mean living on a lower level emotionally.

So you who are young and frightened should look at us old cottontops and see that we have survived pretty well. And so shall you if it ever comes to it. But I am hoarding toothpaste just in case.

Going Down in History

 

A Surprise Request for Family History           

Go memoir yourself---that’s the current advice given to older people and it is a good idea. Those who come after us may want to know where they came from, genetically and geographically. But, in 50 years, unless you write it down, your past will be lost to the future.

Then nobody will know how you ate dirt during the Depression and how you saved aluminum gum wrappers as a way to insure victory during World War II.  Nobody will know the colorful sayings of your grandparents, or how they told you tales about “the old country”, tales that made you happy you lived in the new one.

            So, unless you are a president or a dignitary---not necessarily one and the same---first-person accounts are really the only way to preserve your past. Write about yourself, your parents and your grandparents and go as far back as memory and patience will take you. There are many books, courses and people to help get these memories and thoughts out and down on paper or tape.

But really, just start: I was born in so and so. My earliest memories were such and such. I went to school wherever and I had a big crush on so and so. This you can do.

A Surprise Request for Family History

Now, though we oldsters have been urged to write about ourselves, nobody tells us to write about our children and those are the people grandchildren may be most interested in. At least my grands are and why not? They are closer to their parents than they are to their grandparents and their curiosity about a more immediate past is natural.

Case in point: Last summer, at a three-generation get-together---a time when family stories will out---what the grandchildren wanted to hear were the stories of their parents---what were they like as kids, as teenagers and as young adults. They wanted to know who their parents dated before they ended up with each other and what kind of trouble or glory their parents got into before they assumed the role of middle-aged parents.

The time was ripe for blackmail, but I tried to keep to the truth without telling anything that would send the parents to the law books to see when the statute of limitations had run out on minor crimes of the immature.

That get-together got me thinking about doing a new kind of memoir, not about me, but about my kids---sort of a baby book continued. (Most of us kept those books, with the birth data and first picture, what weight was gained in the first three months. The little baby shoes kept too, or bronzed as if they were the infant feet of gods.)

Well, at least we kept those baby books until the second child came along and buried our good intentions under dirty diapers. After that, the biography of my kids just consisted of the class pictures, year by year, with the bad haircuts and goofy smiles. And after that, their history got even more brief----school yearbooks with short-cut designations of character: most likely to succeed, most likely to make trouble and so forth.

Making Up for Their Lost Years

So how to fill out the lost years of our kids for their kids? Maybe think now about a holiday present. Maybe buy a small blank book and start filling it in with short descriptions and available photos. Nothing fancy, but plenty meaningful to those who care.

My mom, a child singing star, had a scrapbook made by her mom---photos, reviews of performances and clippings from newspapers. If my house burns down, I will grab Cranky Pants, my laptop and that scrapbook, which goes to show that kids do treasure the memories of their parents and maybe that’s where some of our memoir energy might go—not unto ourselves, but unto our kids for their kids.

Now, you who are skilled at scrapbooking can really make something of this project. We who are not so skilled can still do something. A blank book, a pen, some photos, a little glue---a very nice holiday present for the grandkids.

If you can’t get started, just imagine your grandchild 50 years from now rescuing your scrapbook from a burning house. The house will likely never burn, but the desire to know about our parents always, always will.

Conventions: Once a Doubter, Now a Fan

I thought I lived in a house, but now know I was living under a rock---at least when it came to the great American institution of conventions. Until recently, all I encountered were the conventions put on by elephants and donkeys---the political conventions---which I discovered as a kid watching snowy TV pictures coming in under a set of rabbit ears.

            Viewing the vintage political conventions of both parties---well, that was when I starting doubting the intelligence of adults---all those silly hats and the cheering of feel-good speeches whose content was as light as a passing cloud. (I had a content detector even back in 6^th grade.) I thought some of the speakers made Milton Berle look like Socrates. So, back in grade school, I developed a prejudice against conventions. The behavior of conventioneering adults made me not look forward to growing up.

The Changing of a Mind

            There’s nothing like actual experience to change a mind harboring a fossil prejudice. Last week, at the national convention of the AARP in Washington, I learned there are interesting conventions, meetings where people actually learn things and come out at the end better for the experience. OK, pooped from all the walking and the over-stimulation of 30,000 new buddies, but better.

            Maybe I should get out of the house more, but I was blown away by the grandly scaled and beautiful Washington convention center. Imagine an exhibition floor as large as seven football fields and that was just the bottom floor. There were others that harbored a ballroom and a theater, meeting rooms, lounges, grand art-filled halls and most important, enough bathrooms so that one never ever had to wait. (Men may not get this, but women know the importance of no-waiting rest rooms.)

So What Was There for the Learning?

            What wasn’t there? You could learn about budget travel and retiring abroad, about foods that will keep you young, about fixing your digital photos and also about online dating, cruising in China, senior sex from Dr. Ruth in person and so much more, it would take all of today’s paper to relate. But if you wanted to find your dream job, learn about current brain research, catch up on what’s new in eye care, learn what to see in Ireland or where to take an art course in Mexico, someone was there to tell you.

            There were sections on tech---computers lined up classroom style if you wanted to learn to use one better (or at all).  Also, representatives from about every government agency you could name, plus info on Medicare literacy, financial smarts, building communities for successful aging and lots of fun stuff besides. Example: There was a three-band night club the first evening just to get people rocking and rolling, but by dinnertime all I wanted was a room service cheeseburger and bed. (If there is a late night party to poop, just ask me.)

Celebrity City

            Now, if you wanted to see Paul Simon in concert or perhaps Natalie Cole, Ramsey Lewis or Chicago, you could. Regis Philbin was there as were Shirley MacLaine, Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones and the newly famous Young@Heart Chorus, average age 81. Martina Navratilova was present to start off your morning with a fitness session and Chaka Khan was there to sing goodnight. Even Grass Valley has its reps: Both Carole Carson and I gave speeches and were interviewed by John Palmer on Retirement Living Television, though the expo was so big, Carole and I never saw each other.

 

            I did get to meet about 1,894 other people, mostly at Gallo’s Livingston Cellars booth, where, as a spokesperson, I helped introduce many Easterners to the virtues of California wine and, as an author, inflicted all who showed up with my book, Hot Granny. I also met the people who run AARP publications, so now there are faces on the masthead names that put together the magazine appearing regularly in our mailboxes.

            But, by Saturday afternoon, with a tropical storm adding its own excitements, people began tearing down the hundreds of exhibits on the Expo floor. It was as if an entire city was being dismantled. However, like Brigadoon, AARP’s National Event and Expo will rise again in 2009---this time in Las Vegas.

            So, next year, I’m saving October 22-24 for a (gulp!) convention. You can find out more at aarp.org/events or call 1-800-883-2784.

            And now I’ve got to go vacuum my office. The floor is littered with discarded opinions.

 

When the Sky Is Falling: A Simple Plan

It’s epidemic. I’ve got it. Maybe you have it too. You might be picking it up from your television set.

            What I’ve caught is a disease called crisis-itis. I made up the word, but not the symptoms. Don’t know about you---though I can guess---but I am a nervous wreck, unable to sleep, cranky as a winter bear, fatigued from a mean election process that has gone on so long, it can be measured in light years.

            And I’m also getting seasick from watching the market roll on rough seas. (There goes the 401(k), down for the third time. Is that the wreckage of my pension floating out to sea? And where does a federal government that’s in record-breaking debt get the money to rescue failing corporations? Isn’t the pot imagining the kettle is made out of gold?)

            So there you have it: my worry map and it’s probably a lot like yours, except if you are older like me, you realize that it’s impossible to work another 30 years to get back any money you may lose in the market.

            On the other hand, there is a little dark humor to the scene, including the fact that we have socialized some big finance, mortgage and insurance companies, but some are trying to keep the government from sinning its way into “socialized medicine”, aka universal health care. I can manage a weak smile over that irony, but the rest of the scene makes me wish I could go to sleep and wake only when Cranky Pants comes to the castle, kisses me and tells me it’s OK to come out. The dragons are gone.

Controlling the Stress

            Everything I’ve read about stress in the last two decades says that people who have little control over their lives suffer the most stress while those who are able to exert some force and direction are better off. Now, we can’t control the markets or the election process beyond one vote, but we can control ourselves or at least make a good try at relieving anxiety. And we should be motivated to proceed down the road towards greater calm.

            The Mayo Clinic lays out of some of the effects of stress on the body, feelings and behavior...

            Body: Headache, chest pain, pounding heart, high blood pressure, shortness of breath and problems with the gut and with sleep.

            Thoughts and feelings:  Anxiety, restlessness, worrying, irritability, depression and many more downer states.

            Behavior: Overeating, angry outbursts, drug abuse, excessive drinking, increased smoking, social withdrawal and blaming others….which I will not do, but tell me, why did you buy that bad boy mortgage?

Solutions

            There are ways out of any stress mess:

            Exercise: Walk on the sunny side of the street. Get on the treadmill like Cranky Pants. He’s on it every morning right now and his motivating trainer is named Dow Jones.

            Nature: She is always there. Got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. Stars are a bonus. So are Hubble images. Yes, those pics let you know what a tiny piece of stardust you are, but then, so is everything else that is bothering you.

            Meditation: I don’t do lotus positions, but I do lie around and think of beautiful things. Resident in my mind is one room I decorate over and over again, sometimes in mid-century modern, sometimes in French Provincial. I don’t know if your guru would approve, but it works for me.

            Massage/Water relaxation: Maybe you can’t afford a regular massage, but at least one massage will reset the body’s anxiety thermometer. A hot tub or a hot shower also relieves tension. So, instead of watching the nightly news, go sit in a hot tub. The rest of the world is in hot water. You might as well join them.

            Music: Relaxer’s choice. I like a CD of Chinese lullabies or anything by Stan Getz. Taiko drumming might do it for you.

            Friends: Spouting off to friends helps. Always has. Always will. But a little venting goes a long way. If you spend the whole time together complaining, you’ll feel worse than when you started.

            Community events: We live in a place rich in community events. The company of people having good time is an upper. At the Draft Horse Classic I found my Rx: take two Belgians and go back for more in the morning.

            The KVMR Celtic Festival is this weekend….fiddles, bagpipes, singing plus a new something called the Faerie Wood. I don’t know what that is, but I bet you can’t be in it and think about the Securities and Exchange Commission at the same time.

            

Make Your Own Village

 

Second Wind

            Some day you and I will be over the hill. And I say better over the hill than under it.

            Still, the fact is that sometime, when we are a bit more frail and doddery, we may need help to remain independent in our own homes. And if the body and energy falter, it’s helpful and sometimes necessary---to have someone do the driving, shopping, cooking, home repairs and all the other chores of life. It’s also nice when you are sick to have someone bring chicken soup and the pain pills du jour and of course the ice packs after your annual bad fall in the garden. And then there is the basic need for human contact, for pleasant company, for someone to nag and be nagged by---one way to know you are loved.

            I know, all that is what you have a mate for, but couples do not dive into Eternity in sync. It’s not a synchronized event—one always leaves earth before the other, which is a sobering thought, though it can be used to help appreciate your mate more now---absence making the heart grow fonder before the actual absence.

            What’s more, when it comes to counting on mates for help, many older people are not only widowed, but single through choice or divorce. Some are also childless or alienated from their children, so no caring kids are coming to the rescue if one does begin to falter in the life chores department.

             In yesteryear, the old folks and the young folks lived together---my widowed grammy shared my bed when she was old---but today, the middle manager son is transferred to the other coast, the daughter married and moved to Maui and the black sheep kid lives in Thailand and not for the weather. And even if the adult kids were still around within helping distance, most older people I know don’t want to be a burden.

            Like two-year-olds, we want to do it ourselves. Or maybe with a bit of help from other sources.

One New Source to the Rescue           

            So, assuming your family may not be the solution or even the one you want… and assuming you and I do not have a butler, driver, maid and handyperson on our household staff, we will need help and so will millions of other people in the US. And, mirable dictu---which means No Kidding in Latin---there is actually a solution to our needs, something that is happening quietly all over the country,

Making Your Own Extended Family

            The solution, already a reality in some places, is to invent an area support group, a “village” in your town. It means getting together a membership organization of older people that offers the following services: driving to appointments or shopping, getting the house repairs done, cleaning, help with housework, care when you’re down and out physically plus nutrition services---which often means meals delivered to the door.

            The model for this solution comes from Beacon Hill Village in Boston. The neighbors there got together and organized to help each other survive as older adults in their own homes. The Village offers household and home maintenance services, health and wellness help, including exercise opportunities. And since isolation can be a problem for older people, they also arrange small get-togethers, parties and trips as well as cultural opportunities for expanding minds and life experience. All in all, they say they want to make “remaining at home a safe, comfortable and cost-effective solution.”

            Through media exposure, people all over the US heard about Beacon Hill Village. They had so many requests for information about organizing this service for older adults that they now have a detailed handbook that covers all the how’s of starting a membership organization.

            The manual, which can be ordered by mail, phone or online offers help from the founders, the original business plan, marketing materials, fundraising letters, board and committee structures, budgets and ways to help you develop your own Beacon Village. The price for this package is $350 for non-profits and neighborhood groups or $500 for profits and municipalities.

            The web site is www.beaconhillvillage.org and the email is bhvillage@aol.com. Phone: 617-723-4117. Address: 74 Joy Street, Boston MA 02114.

            Doesn’t all this sound better than counting on Black Baa to come back from Thailand to pick up your meds at the drug store? Besides, he might make off with your pain pills.

Staying Upright

If I ever do one thing for you, let it be this: may I keep you from cracking your head or any other precious body part in a fall that could send you to bed, the ER or heaven.

            In movies and cartoons, falls are funny. Prat falls were the bread and butter of the old vaudeville comedians. But in real life, falls can stop life as you know it. The more “ordinary” changes include everything from having to rely on pain pills to get through the day to not getting anywhere at all because the hip is broken or the car-shifting arm in a sling. Big changes include being bed-ridden, unable to work or take care of yourself and, worse case, leaving the planet for Higher Places. As I write this, today’s local obits tell the sad story of an older woman who died from a fall.

            I know, I know…I’m a nag, but my own fall last winter and the fact my friends are going down like clear-cut timber is turning me into a fallevangelist.

            In my own fall I was lucky: A concussion just ruined a vacation and not a life. A CAT scan revealed that my brains had not scrambled and when I asked the doc if he saw another book inside my skull, he said yes. So, for an author, that was the one good part.

Basic Advice About Staying Safe

·      Homes: Our homes are snakepits when it comes to falls. If you have a residential choice, go for a single story or one with the master on the main floor. Get good lighting, especially on stairs. Remove little rugs that will trip you up. Put in a movement-sensitive night light for the 1 AM trips to the john. Stay off ladders. Put a non-skid mat in the tub and a safety bar over the tub. Safety bars for the bath have gotten more chic, less sterile.

·      Little Critters: Grandkids and pets can trip you. Grandkids leave their toys around on the floor. Your dog can pull you over when the leash is wrapped around your wrist and he goes dashing after a squirrel.

·      Meds: Many are the medications and med interactions that can decrease alertness, cause dizziness or just screw up your balance. Maybe your doc can switch the med or order a lower dose, but be aware of what meds can do to you. Consider asking if they are really necessary and proven effective in actual practice. (Lest you think I am too negative here, remember all the recalls of prescribed drugs that once passed FDA muster.)

·      Travel. This is my downfall. A gawker, I look up at the sights when I should be looking down at the cobblestones. Or I fail to notice that the marble floors of the museum are wet. Enough said. Get your travel radar going when you go to unfamiliar places.

·      Physical Shape: If you dance, exercise, hike and otherwise move yourself in space, you will have better control of your balance, more agility and greater muscle strength to keep it all together.     

·      Know your own vulnerabilities. It may be in the garden, on the front steps or riding your bike on rocky dirt paths. Cranky Pants’ downfall is driveway ice. Friend X’s is getting up and out of bed too fast before her blood has a chance to catch up to her brain. Mine is unfamiliar places. Know yours.

Big Doings in the World of Falls

            The local Falls Prevention Coalition has declared September 21 to 28 the week they will do everything they can to keep the people of Nevada County upright. They start with a kickoff event on Sunday, September 21 at Peace Lutheran Church, 828 West Main in Grass Valley---2:30 to 6:30 PM---offering info, entertainment and a free meal. They then proceed through the week with workshops and seminars. To register for the Sunday event or to find out more about the week, call Helpline at 530-273-2273.

            Now, remember, I don’t want to meet you in the ER, but if we do get there at the same time, I’ll be the one eating her words.