Monthly Archives: July 2014

The Secret Word Is Banana

I flunked the short-term memory test today at the doctor’s office. “Here are three words: banana, sunrise, chair,” said the nurse. “What are the three words?” “Banana, sunrise, chair,” I repeated proudly. Many questions and unrelated conversations later, she handed me a piece of paper. “Write those three words I gave you earlier,” she said. All I could remember was banana, probably because I’d had nothing to eat, it being lab tests that required fasting. “Hey,” I protested, I thought I no longer needed those words so I sloughed them off. That’s what we old people do.”

Another new wrinkle (no pun intended) in the aging process is that one’s annual physical now includes psychological questioning to determine whether the person is depressed, suicidal, drinking too much, losing sleep and a lot of other things including becoming more forgetful.

For one of today’s tests, the nurse asked me to draw the face of a clock and to indicate the time of 11:10. I was proud of the fact that I started with the 12, 3, 6 and 9 and then filled in the other numbers. Shows I recognize spacial distances, I thought. When I got home I happened to glance at a clock. Oh, my gosh, I’d mixed up the hands, showing the time as 1:55. Sure hope she remembers my mentioning I am left-handed. We left-handers frequently get things backwards.

I don’t mean to make light of these kinds of tests. We are all terrified of developing dementia or Alzheimers, its most common form, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of cases. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the disease “is not a normal part of aging, although the greatest known risk factor is increasing age, and the majority of people with Alzheimer’s are 65 and older.” But, the Association’s literature continues, “up to five percent of people with the disease have early onset Alzheimer’s which often appears when someone is in their 40s or 50s.”

So what to do? A person I know gives himself daily mental exercises through luminosity.com. Others play Words with Friends online or do crosswords and word puzzles. My hope lies with two daily newspapers and a bunch of magazines, along with constant book-reading. It is scary to imagine what it must be like to be aware of your mind slowly fading away.

I joked a lot during today’s testing and made the nurse laugh several times. Next time I’ll take it more seriously. The joking older people do about memory loss is akin to whistling past the graveyard. Which is another thing we’re good at.

Idle Thoughts over the Ironing Board

iron-clip-art_419552What!? You still iron? No one irons anymore.

Yes, I’ve observed that. But to my mind, with the exception of seersucker, there’s hardly any fabric that can’t be made to look better with the ministrations of a warm iron or a burst of steam.

To the idle thoughts. Which do you suppose came first: women’s clothing manufacturers skimping on fabric to make short sleeves that are too short or women half-killing themselves in daily exercising to tone their upper arms so as to accommodate the too-short sleeves? And don’t blame Michelle Obama, she of the super-toned arms. She is just a product of her times, what I like to think of as the fitness obsessed generation.

As someone who hasn’t shown her own upper arms in public in decades, I find it all very distressing. I watch women newscasters on TV, their arms bared through all seasons, and it makes me feel personally cold, even more so in winter. Do the studio lights keep those women from breaking out in goose bumps? I’m grateful to Rachel Maddow who continues to show up in a suit jacket atop the jeans that you know are hidden from camera range.

And speaking of cold, how about restaurants? In most, the cold air blasts right along with the music, and people of a certain age huddle in their booths, swaddled in shawls and cardigans pretending they can hear enough to follow the conversation.

Here in Los Angeles, this city built atop a desert, the temperature plummets once the sun goes down. So I am frequently cold. I keep waiting for my East Coast body to acclimate to West Coast temperatures but it doesn’t appear it’s going to happen. Our mailman wears shorts year-round and people live in flip-flops if they’re wearing anything on their feet at all. A young man in the pew ahead of me in church one day was barefooted. At one point he began standing on one foot, with the other foot resting, sole up, on the seat. I stared at the bottom of his foot which was understandably not clean.

In the wintertime, when daytime temperatures hover in the high-50s and low-60s, I’ll be driving around sometimes wearing two sweaters and a jacket. On the street, I’ll see people in tank tops and shorts. It takes all my self-control not to open the window and shout, “Put some clothes on before you catch your death!”

But this is summertime with the state of undress even more exaggerated. People deal with the drought and wish for rain. And I find my idle thoughts moving in other directions. Like: Do you suppose there is a job description for the person who assures that more than one tissue at a time emerges from the box? Or the one who makes sure that the tube of sunblock dispenses far more product than one needs to protect those over-exposed limbs? Just thinking.

He Did Not Die on the Fourth of July

July 4 (2)It’s July 4th and I’m feeling nostalgic for Independence Days past. Montclair, New Jersey did a fine job with the holiday, beginning with a parade of marching bands and representatives of various organizations in town. The parade was heralded every time first by the appearance of antique cars (“You know you’re getting old when the cars in the parade are identical to ones you went out in on dates,” I always said.) If you were lucky and knew a friend on the parade route, you could stand on their porch eating bagels and drinking Bloody Marys while watching the parade. Later in the evening there was a big fireworks display on the high school’s football field.

I’m sure there are wonderful parties here in Los Angeles this year, parties on boats, in fabulous homes on the beach, but we are babysitting two grand-dogs and one grand-cat. So lots of time for nostalgia.

Back in Montclair, the festivities presented a large gap of downtime in the afternoon – more than enough to sleep off the Bloody Marys – and then what? That is why Ed and I began hosting a party at our house. We provided hot dogs and hamburgers, along with cheap beer and wine, while the guests brought everything else. (“What do you need me to bring?” “Anything.” “But don’t you worry there’ll be nothing but potato salad?” “Never happens.”)July 4th food

One year, after one such party, the guests all hurried off to the fireworks and we stayed behind cleaning up. As we walked back and forth through the screen door, an insect began buzzing against the screen and the cat batted at it from inside. On one of his trips through the door, Ed suddenly felt a sharp sting on his arm. “Ow!” he said. “That hurts.” In a short time he said, “You know, I feel strange.” “How strange?” I asked. “I don’t know, kind of light-headed.”

Being in a mellow mood after the day’s activities, I suggested we go to the hospital.” “That’s silly,” he said. “It’s just a sting.” “Oh, c’mon,” I persisted. “Let’s just go there.” As we drove, I asked him about symptoms, information I’d picked up from my own experience with yellow jackets. “Are you feeling warm? Short of breath? Is your throat closing?” When he answered yes, I began running red lights and screeched up near the hospital’s emergency entrance. But I’d parked too far back. “We’ll just have to walk the rest of the way,” I told him.  His walking became slower and slower. “C’mon,” I urged. “Can’t you go any faster?”

The security guard noticed and came with a wheelchair. “I’ll bring him,” he said. “You go ahead and sign him in.” While I was answering questions and filling out forms, the guard arrived with the wheelchair and Ed who promptly passed out. “Oh my God!” I screamed. “Do something!” The receptionist picked up the phone, the emergency room door flew open and a team of doctors and nurses whisked him away. I went back to the paperwork and then, as instructed, went to sit in the waiting room.

After what seemed a very long while, a doctor appeared and sat beside me. “Well,” he said, “we almost lost him but he’s going to be okay.” “You almost what??!” I said. “He got stung by a bug.” “Yes,” the doctor replied, “and it put him into anaphylactic shock. “His heart stopped and his pulse rate went to nearly zero.” Later Ed said he remembered hearing a voice say, “That’s it. This guy’s out of here.” But other voices urged him to “hang in there, you can make it.” We later learned that hearing is the last sense to go.

hornet 2After an overnight stay in intensive care, Ed was released with prescriptions, including one for a kit of medications to carry in case of another attack, and shortly signed up for desensitizing allergy shots. And we both got educated about insect stings. Ed’s attacker was a white-faced hornet, also called a bald-faced hornet, a particular nasty variety, made all the nastier by the tormenting cat. While not the first insect sting of Ed’s life, we learned the venom’s intensity can build up in a body over time. We also learned that many deaths attributed to heart attacks could very possibly have resulted from insect stings. A person working alone in his garden, ignoring a sting, could die there without anyone knowing the real reason.

What I have never been able to reconcile in my mind is what kept me from saying to Ed that night,  “Oh, why don’t you just go lie down and see how you feel later?”

Photos: huffingtonpost.com; bioweb.uwlax.edu