Growing old

I went to see my PCP yesterday. (A PCP is a Primary Care Physician for the non-accronym crowd.) Tomorrow I go to see my cardiologist. I also have a urologist and a nephrologist.

The cardiologist and nephrologist are teaching doctors. (I go to UMDNJ--University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.) They have a cloud of Resident Doctors and Interns following them around like mosquitoes ... everytime I come to a stop long enough, they poke me with something. (That's not entirely true, but I like the metaphor.)

My PCP is also a professor, but I see her and my urologist mostly in a clinic/office setting one on one.

I go to doctors a lot because I have a lot going on in my body that needs medical care. I go to UMDNJ and its related Unversity Hospital because I want the best medical care I can get.

I give you all this background because having chronic illnesses can be depressing at times. I know. And for many of us simply talking about what is going in our lives with another person who has been through the same mill, can be of benefit in working through the low spot ... can help put things back in perspective ... and it gets me off my personal, isolated pity-pot of "poor me".

You know, approaching 66 at the end of this month, I no longer am caught up in the bullshit of having to pretend I'm something I'm not. (Gawd, what a relief it was to shed THAT male egocentric insanity!)

At a much younger age I wrote, "It is high time we removed ourselves from our cubicle of pretended perfection, destroyed its walls, and viewed openly the mass of humanity moving with us toward the ultimate solution of existence."

Part of what I want to do with my blog, is share my experiences in growing old, which include my cronic illnesses and their impact on the quality of my life.

One of the startling discoveries I had in growing up was that I wasn't as unique (or sinful) as I thought I was, and with the publishing of the Kinsey Report: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) I learned that masturbation was almost universal in human males which in turn was the beginning of my doubt that the Bible was a true revelation from a real God. I knew I loved Jesus as a "born-again" Christian, but as a teenager I could no more stop masturbating than I could stop eating.

I no longer need to believe the Bible, or that Jesus was God as I did as a child because I believed the sacred elders in my life who taught me this was the only way to escape the fires of Hell for eternity--and believe me, at the time I was deathly afraid of being burned alive! Realizing that they were all lying to me, either consciously or because they refused to ask any questions (dared not ask questions!) was an epiphany of monumental effect.

Just as sexuality is common to all of us (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual ... or a combination), aging is common to everyone who lives long enough. And it is something I am becoming VERY familiar with ... so I'll try to share some of it honestly with you ... the premises being (1.) the commonality of the human condition and (2.) that knowing is better than not knowing.

Cheers!