Anniversary

I posted my first OWLcourage blog contribution on January 3, 2022.  This fact shines a light on progress made and changes that have emerged, an “anniversary” reconsideration, even reckoning. Three years ago I had set out to focus on my personal perspective with the bemused reference to OWL as a focus on “Old White Lady”, the sardonic nod to my “demographics”. The assumption was that though I thought of myself more as an elderly, beige woman, I was paying attention to the larger cultures' description of me (Old White Lady).  And I was focused on what I considered three central areas of cultural conflict in the US: personal identity based on generational membership, race and ethnicity, and gender and its permutations. These summarized my mail points of interest.

A lot can happen in three years. The nation is experiencing a deep tidal shift focused on two of those areas of conflict: race and ethnicity and gender and its permutations. In both cases, those who had invested in a less restrictive response to these conflicts find themselves being swept out like detritus, as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) becomes a focal point for intense destructive actions.  It is not complicated: it got “too’ diverse, the equity seemed to give an advantage to some that appeared to diminish the advantage others believed to be a birthright, and the inclusion of all this was overwhelming and intolerable, a source of both fear and rage.

For me,

OWLcourage was to be a source of hope and possibility, a central commitment as I conceptualized the blog. I also committed to weekly postings, a practice that bumped up against the unplanned impact of life events. On Nov. 5 (yes, election day) I tested positive for Covid for the fifth time (yes, you read that correctly, 5 times!).  I had carefully gotten all vaccines and boosters as advised. And I had Covid 5 times.  I also had the added mystery (much of Covid continues to be a mystery) of a secondary effect of the virus.

I am one of the people who actually gets quite sick and miserable when they have Covid, and after the fifth experience, I trust my current insights into how I experience this infection. After 5 miserable days, the middle day being the worst, I am always surprised by something that Covid triggers, usually an auto-immune response. These responses appear to escalate, become more serious, and the early November infection concluded with a sudden onset of atrial fibrillation, affectionately referred to as “a-fib” since it is becoming increasing common.  One cause of a-fib gaining some recognition is the onset post Covid.

While I was able to post twice to OWLcourage early in this journey of illness, my one per week plan for the blog fell by the wayside as I entered the world of cardiovascular malfunction and all its implications. This explains the delay in postings, but also highlights the time and energy dedicated to trying to both manage the disease and learn to live with it. Much of that process provided robust lessons on the impact of aging on diseases. Hence, the third focus of this blog (old/elderly), the area not directly under assault by the current national leadership, is the one where the most insight and awareness took shape.

I have several friends who are, like me, clearly and actively engaged in “aging”.  We have all noticed that most of what is written to guide one through the process of aging or to help others do so is actually formulated by people who have never tried it.  They are advising on something about which they have no personal knowledge or experience. There is therefore a veritable cornucopia of phenomena associated with “aging” with little more to make sense of that association than someone’s opinion.

It was early in my current health care adventure that the energetic Emergency Department physician told me, when I asked her what had caused my a-fib, “You’re old. Your heart is old. It is just flip flapping about in there because it’s old.”  Though some may think this insensitive, I liked her candor and her willingness to simply plug in the explanation in the books, where aging is listed as the primary cause of a-fib.

And a-fib was useful in other ways.  It is not really life threatening, especially if treated, but its symptoms, especially shortness of breath, feel life threatening.  This was a “New Illness” story for me, and included several Emergency Department, visits, also a “New” experience. Fear, which I work actively to NOT let it shape my life and choices, suddenly had purchase where I did not want it to have purchase. I slowly realized that with a-fib I would have a life-altering chronic disease, though its scope of impact was unknown. While I was able to have a symptom altering “ablation” procedure, it included an “atypical” 6-day hospitalization, most likely linked to the effect of a-fib when you are elderly.  I had prior hospitalizations, none with the unique subtext of “elderly patient”.

My most important personal resources were my curiosity and my humor.  The former kept me learning lessons from the experience, the latter kept me laughing at how much of the experience tapped into the ultimate dissonance embedded in all human experiences.  My daughters were extraordinary supports, both traveling to my home to assist me during this process; my older daughter as a physician assessing all that occurred and ensuring my well-being. I had numerous friends who were both helpful and supportive throughout my adventure, including one who delivered me to one of my Emergencye Department visits. As is obvious, I had advantages many elderly patients do not have.

All I have written thus far seems like context for my anniversary as an OWL who writes a blog with a quiet nod to courage. It also reveals what doing so while aging introduces, the most obvious being the tenuous nature of planning and proclaiming. The light I am shining on all of this is revelatory.

While I think I have thought through most of the realities associated with being a person nearing death, I think I had not thought through the realities of decline that reshape “quality of life”.  As a broader insight, it seems to me that we are searching for ways to slow down or avoid aging and ensure longevity though the insights on “quality of life” have been minimally explored, perhaps because they are so unsettling.  I am OK with aging; I just don’t like that the process will probably include the steady decline in my “quality of life”.

What has emerged thus far in my thinking is the conviction that “quality of life” is a very personal, subjective, even individualistic inner judgment, and we have few markers to help the elderly explore this dimension of aging.  We have a boat load of opinions, and many elderly are navigating the opinions of others imposed on them, often in the name of love. In those books I mentioned, this is given very limited air time without grappling with the uniquely personal nature of the concept of “quality of life”.  More often the books tell the reader how to adjust to the decline as an inevitability.

All this pondering about “quality of life” as a more challenging construct than “longevity” has altered the lens I use to make sense of my daily life. I find myself fascinated by the huge industry to deal with wrinkles and crepey skin, the obsessive concern about the amount needed for a retirement fund, the weird commercials on game apps that say they are for seniors, with “large font, colorful images… that will ensure sleep and reverse memory loss”. There is a long list here.

The reality is that we, as a nation, perhaps because of the surge of aging persons as the Boomers move toward this developmental stage, are presenting a “story” of aging that enjoys high distortion, the avoidance of the obvious end point, death, and interestingly, almost nothing on the gradual alterations in “quality of life” that are not disabling but still of lower quality than last year at this time. Gradually, these alterations start to stack up like cords of firewood that play a cloudy but confining role in the day to day existence of the elderly person.

This is just one piece of the puzzle called aging, a puzzle common to humans, yet poorly understood and managed. I am living the puzzle, and see more clearly now that the OWLcourage blog might best serve if it explores this puzzle more deliberately, not with correct answers to tough questions but with reflective consideration emergent from the lived experience of aging. I have done some of that in OWLcourage; I have pondered the wisdom of doing more.

The backdrop of all of this, of course, is the convulsive nature of both our national and our global existence. There is so much to struggle with, so much that evokes fear and despair, so many options for making a difference, for doing something, anything to try to offer a positive field of life to offset the overpowering sense of a chaotic negative windstorm of cruelty and caprice.  OWLcourage is for me the one place where I might offer that positive field, and my reckoning renews my engagement.  As is apparent, I have learned that promising a pattern of postings is a bit delusional, but postings will show up.

“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr. -

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