Elderpain

Well, I went for a treadmill exercise stress test and didn't exactly cover myself with glory. Build up your endurance, ordered the doctor. My regular aquafitness class and low-impact seniors exercise class are fun and get you moving, but they don't pump up my heart rate or make me sweat. So I signed up for low-impact aerobics classes geared to adults, not just seniors. Figured I would just adapt as needed. What a glorious feeling, huffing and puffing and sweating alongside all those young sylphs. Hah! You're just as old as you feel.

The next day, of course, I could hardly crawl out of bed. Pain in the hips, pain in the calves, pain in the shoulders, but what glorious pain! Young people's pain, badge of honour pain, pain that goes away. Such a nice change from the usual elderpain. You know what I mean by elderpain: the nagging, gnawing, unrelenting complaints of bones and joints and muscles, pain that gets steadily worse over time and won't ever go away. It slows you down, makes you tired, blackens your mood, keeps you at home. If you take painkillers for it, you have to choose your trade-offs, balancing pain relief against a burnt-out stomach or a rotting liver or a fuzzy brain. You're constantly adjusting to it, going ahead with your life as well as you can while it grinds away in the background.

But if there's one thing worse than elderpain, it's sitting around with our senior friends and going on and on about it. Such a cliché, old folks whining about our aches and pains. What glorious indulgence! But pretty soon we're just drowning in everyone's misery. Is there nothing else going on in our lives? Can't we just move on to books, movies, politics, music? We'll feel like functioning adults again. Don’t dump your elderpain on your friends. As Archie Bunker used to say, stifle yourself.