False Expectations

This month I will see all six of my doctors. Six! My VA doc, my private GP, my oncologist, my radiologist, my andrologist and my age management physician. I’ll look in my medicine cabinet and see a dozen medications I’m supposed to be taking everyday looking back. How did a guy like me, who has never spent a night in the hospital or emergency room, who eats healthy and exercises regularly, turn into the dull, gray old man I see in the mirror?

Despite my best of intentions and doing all the right things, cancer still got me. I had to deal with prostate cancer while still keeping an eye out for cancers in other organs. Colon cancer killed my dad and I remember it vividly. I am precisely the age he was when he died. My mom and her mom got breast cancer.

Looking at the circumstances, it would be easy to put myself into the prison of expectations of what old people should be like: dependent upon medications, social services, help from family, ranting on Facebook, shaking my fist at low-flying planes and kids on my lawn...

Or I could delude myself with the illusion that I’m actually a 30-year-old man in a 63-year-old body, that I’ve skipped middle age entirely and am not old at all. My blood chemistries prove it. Last year I did well in a Taekwondo tournament, was recruited to work as a male model on Project Runway, wrote a book, set up a business, and got myself certified in Age Management Medicine. I’m still pushing the envelop.

Both frameworks – the doddering old geezer and the stud who never ages – are illusions. They’re socially and biologically reinforced concepts – preconceptions, really – founded in a world that is fading. My expectations of what life and people should look like, based upon what I saw around me in the 1950s, are wrong.

A big challenge of the Second Sixty years is dealing with the tyranny of wrong expectations. It’s taking me inward on a journey of self-examination. I’ll post what I discover from time to time and look forward to hearing back from the blogosphere.