Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Old is Gold - Or is it ?

As I sat outside the Operation Theatre waiting for my mother's surgery to finish, memories of her younger self, when she would be full of energy and without an illness kept clouding my vision. It was only 15 years back when she had run from Pillar to Post, from one medical Department to another for my father's cancer treatment, gave her own blood to save him (and saved he was, for a good 10 years) and came back home to dinner, without an iota of tiredness and without an aching bone in her body. We always assumed she was fit for life and had unlimited stamina. But as I now realise, for a woman of her fitness and the ssupremely good habits and discipline of lifestyle, even she is aging and experiencing old age symptoms just like everyone else. She has aching knees, suffers from high BP, wears dentures and has just been detected a diabetic 2 yrs back, which doctors think is remarkable, since she's gorged on sweets and milk all her life and always burned the body sugar into energy all her life. And the latest is that the numbness of 2 fingers that she had been experiencing lately, turns out to be a cryptically defined syndrome called CTS (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) and here she is in the OT for a hand surgery to release the Carpal Ligament, that was pressing on the median nerve, creating the numbness of fingers. She'll be fine in another few weeks but why should this happen at all.

Not that I haven't seen older people before. Grand parents I thought were born old. I could never picture them young and frolicking. But to see your own parents gradually age in front of you and see the various small or big ailments creep into their once healthy bodies and shake their own confidence, makes me believe in the inevitability of thing called Life. We, as humans can probably control the causes only to an extent. Otherwise, how is it that perfectly healthy people suffer strokes or develop cancer. Science, God bless the scientists, indeed comes closest to God I think. How else could the dentures be made or pacemakers be fitted or kidneys be replaced and in our case, numbness of fingers be surgically treated. It gives me hope for my mom to lead a better old age than probably what my grand parents experienced. And it makes me rethink of the sedentary lifestyle we lead in urban cocoons and concrete jungles and if we will have a better or worse aging. Only time will tell. And then, perhaps I will read this blog again.

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