Apparently getting older means your body starts throwing warning lights due to absolutely everything.
When I was a kid I remember days when I would be standing outside in a snowstorm, temperatures so cold that you'd take turns pulling your hands out of your pockets to thaw your ears, waiting for a school bus that didn't come because it was snowed in and nobody told us. As the last kid to be picked up on a rural highway route, this was the reality of a lot of winter days.
I'd end up soaked from the knees down because apparently snowpants were for cowards. Other times I’d spend the day being coughed on by my friends, sharing their drinks, touching absolutely everything after others handled it, eating something that had fallen on the floor... 5 second rule, am I right?... and I'd wake up the next morning completely fine.
Fast forward to today and it seems like if I'm exposed to a baby sneezing 3 aisles over in Canadian Tire I need to call work and tell them, "See ya in 6 business days". But now that I think about it, am I actually getting sick or is my body just having to handle more issues as I grow older?
I mean, when I was in my teens, getting five or six hours of sleep a night just meant you were pretty tired the next day. It was like the old days of running Windows XP and you opened Notepad. Nothing much happened.
At 48 it's like your body is running 12 background processes, with 20 browser tabs open, and then you decide to calculate pi to its last decimal place. Even one night short of sleep and you not only wake up tired, your back hurts, your stomach is pissed off, your brain is foggy, your medication doesn't seem to feel right, the amount of patience you have is next to none... then you run into someone in the shop who's come to work sick. At that point your body just can't help but go:
"What the fuck, dude?!"
To put it into mechanic terms, my body used to run like a 2020 Toyota RAV4, with its bulletproof A25A-FKS engine, that you could pull out of a lake and the damn thing would fire up and run beautifully after a simple oil change.
Today it seems more like a Ford F-150 with the notorious EcoBoost V6 that's gone 100,000 highway miles with spark plugs that started dying 40,000 miles ago.
I'm not the only one who's noticed the change, either. I've heard more than a few comments from coworkers about how much work I seem to miss. The funny part is that a lot of those comments come from younger guys who seem to think I'm about ten years younger than I actually am. They're in their late twenties or early thirties and, for whatever reason, often peg me as being somewhere around 35 rather than pushing 50. They expect me to be able to work as hard as they do and, quite frankly, at their age I can say with confidence that I worked even harder and complained a hell of a lot less. The difference is that I'm not in my early thirties anymore.
It feels like every month I'm losing a couple of days here and there, even though I wake up every workday intending to go. The problem usually isn't finding the motivation to get there. I mean, who doesn't love making money? The problem is whether my body is actually capable of cooperating. There have been plenty of mornings where I'm showered, shaved, teeth brushed, work shirt on, and halfway through pulling up my pants when I suddenly stop and think, "What the hell am I doing? There's no way I can work on cars like this."
You see, it's not really that I feel I'm getting sick more. In fact, if I had to count the days of actual viral illness, it'd possibly be less than when I was a kid. What I think is happening is that my aging body just has less tolerance these days for bullshit. As time goes on it seems to gain more "conditions", like unlocking achievements in a video game, and every unlock makes my body less tolerant of abnormalities.
When we're talking about abnormalities, I think the most recent wrench in the gears was that I came to discover I had, or rather was finally diagnosed with, ADHD. That diagnosis finally gave me a way to start understanding and dealing with behavioral issues that had been present throughout my life.
I thought having a brain that "squirreled" was just normal for everyone. I thought being overly disorganized yet yearning for organization was something we all struggled with. It wasn't until I started taking medication to manage my ADHD that I realized how "handicapped" my life had been. Unfortunately, for me, that medication comes with a slew of side effects. While taking it I've experienced bouts of insomnia, anxiety, decreased appetite, and possibly even nausea.
The reason I say "possibly" is due to the next source of abnormality in my life. A few years ago I developed GERD, which being overweight probably hasn't helped, but I also secretly wonder if a lifetime of elevated milk consumption may have contributed. This makes my stomach a lot more sensitive to food, and not just spicy food.
I could eat something like a sandwich one day and be perfectly fine, and the next day it'll give me an almost vomit-inducing acid reflux storm. Often, the only real difference is the time of day I ate it. Unfortunately, due to its almost criminal unpredictability, the actual impact of my GERD medication can vary dramatically.
The type of medication I'm on was prescribed to me on an “as needed” basis rather than something I'm supposed to take continuously. In fact, I was specifically warned against simply taking it every day because prolonged use can sometimes lead to rebound acid production when you stop. The problem is that “as needed” and GERD don't always seem to cooperate particularly well. By the time I realize I need it, I'm already awake at two in the morning with heartburn that could be used to power a steam turbine.
Speaking of things happening at night. Years before my GERD diagnosis I went to a sleep clinic and discovered I had sleep apnea. I guess I've known I had this for a long time. As far back as I can remember I've been a loud snorer. My first wife used to mention that I would have pauses in breathing at night, which would cause her to lay there waiting for my next breath. I was also, and still am, a really heavy mover at night. I could go to sleep on the left of the bed, lying on my back, and wake up halfway across the bed lying face down. That said, the diagnosis came with more abnormalities to my life.
Since I was diagnosed, I've had this machine sitting next to my bed. It's got a long hose and a face mask that I've never grown comfortable wearing. It's either too loose and I don't get a good air seal, or it's too tight and I feel pressure all around my face all night. I think the longest I ever put up with wearing the mask was about an hour. At times it feels like the machine that's supposed to help my apnea is more disruptive to my sleep than the apnea itself. And that's another process running in the background. Even when I'm supposedly doing nothing more strenuous than sleeping, my body has somehow managed to turn it into a complicated medical procedure.
On top of all these medical conditions and medication side effects, which certainly seem to have more of an effect on me the older I get, there's also the everyday trope of simply waking up with aches and pains, not knowing where the hell they came from. I mean, I've woken up with a shoulder that felt dislocated. I've woken up with a leg that's locked up in a severe muscle spasm. I've woken up with a lower back that feels like I fell down 30 flights of stairs. You could go to bed perfectly fine and in the morning be a complete train wreck. There's no logic to it.
I guess the point I'm getting to here is that, when you get older, it seems that getting "sick" has a lot less to do with viruses and a lot more to do with your body just having less tolerance for the bullshit life throws at it. You don't need to be infected with influenza to be puking all day. You don't have to contract dysentery to be trapped within 10 meters of a toilet for an unreasonable number of hours. You don't have to be subjected to a room full of sick people to wake up in the morning feeling like Death will soon be knocking on your door.
Getting older certainly has its perks, don't get me wrong. I'm much happier and living a much better life than I ever have. That said, I also seem to be spending more time sidelined on the bench than ever before.
At the ripe age of 48, I'm happier with the person behind the wheel than I've ever been. Unfortunately, the machine itself has reached the point where the maintenance intervals involve a hell of a lot more than just oil changes.
