by Randy Granny
There’s nothing laudable about growing old. It doesn’t deserve a round of applause or audience approval.
It really doesn’t deserve any acknowledgement, because it‘s nothing you strived for or worked hard for, such as finding a cure for all deadly diseases; bringing about world peace; becoming a world-famous actor; becoming Father-of-the-Year, President of the United States, a great baseball player, a fabulous artist or brilliant CEO, who took a rundown company, turned it into a Fortune 500 company and spread the wealth by employing thousands of people.
It’s nothing more than winning the gene pool!
This rant was brought on by reading about the modern day status symbol for country bragging rights about being home to the “oldest living person.”
Currently the country of Georgia has laid claimed to that, with a 130-year-old Georgian lady. Some of the facts don’t add up, like the fact that she has a son who’s in his 70s meaning that she would have had to have been in her 60s when he was born, but stranger things have been known to happen without man’s intervention.
Additionally, I receive an email from a friend pissing and moaning over getting older, and all the accompanying aches and pains and worst of all for women…the inevitable thickening of the waist with belly fat that no amount of exercise or diet will overcome.
All I could do was write her back and commiserate by saying, “Amen to that!” Since I’m slightly older than she, I know just how she feels. Old age is the pits and full of Mom Nature’s dirty little tricks.
The list of age-old old age grievances goes on and on, but why bore you with them when -- if you’re over 40 -- you already know them too well.
What’s so terrific about being any number of years over 40 and, like an old car, have all the parts start to break down?
I’m reminded of this every morning getting out of bed.
For me, it’s not the getting out of bed part; it’s the last portion of the multi-part ritual of getting up. Unlike when I was a teen and could roll over and go back to sleep for a couple of hours, I have to pee so bad, I’m forced to get up or have a terrible embarrassing accident.
I run downstairs to chug down an aspirin to ward off the anticipate back pain, turn on the fire under the water kettle, grab the first cigarette of the day while making a dash to the ’facility’ before the pee starts to run down my leg.
Before I’m able to place my still girlish, flat-ass butt (don’t even ask about the belly fat and lost waistline) on the throne where I sit with the pee uncontrollably running into the porcelain bowl and spending another five minutes coaxing the last few drops to trickle out, or I‘ll be back in there a few minutes later.
Up to that point I feel just fine.
It’s the sitting that’s the killer! While I can jump out of bed like a teen, I can’t pry myself off the pot with anything that comes close to pain-free dignity.
In those few minutes of sitting, my severely arthritic lower back -- the portion between the small of the back and the top of the hips -- has become a frozen block of wood making it utterly painful to turn to flush and stagger half bent over to the sink.
I’m sure there are ways around it. I could grow a penis. I could strip naked and straddle the bowl. I could rig up some kind of trough. I could go out in the yard and lift my leg like the dog. I could come back as a man in my next life, but this is the here-and-now, and if there are past lives, we don’t remember them anyway, so there’s no advantage to that.
What a way to start every single goddamn day.
Of course, the logical retort to such a statement is ’at least you got up.’
Spare me the b.s. optimism.
I know there are people who have worse problems, but no one -- if they’re honest -- can feel someone else’s pain. If they say they can, they’re lying!
What ever pain we’re feeling, it is the worst and hardest to cope with.
And believe me, sometimes that morning lower back pain is so bad I wish someone would just shoot me and take me out of my misery. Then the aspirin kicks in.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Grouchy Granny Makes Bomb Threat at Grandkids’ School
by Sandy Sand
Most grannies will do what it takes to visit the grandkids, be it hopping on a train, plane or bus, or even making a phone call, but not this kind of call: A bomb treat to the kids school.
Velma Gladys Brewster, 51, of San Antonio, Texas, was booked on charges of making a terrorist threat to Windcrest Elementary School in northeastern San Antonio. She is free on bail.
After receiving the phoned threat that was left on the school‘s voicemail, school officials evacuated the campus of more than 700 students. A thorough search of the school and it’s grounds revealed that there were no explosives, police said.
The reason given for Brewster’s ouster from the campus was because her daughter did not leave permission for her to visit her grandchildren at school, officials said.
Most grannies will do what it takes to visit the grandkids, be it hopping on a train, plane or bus, or even making a phone call, but not this kind of call: A bomb treat to the kids school.
Velma Gladys Brewster, 51, of San Antonio, Texas, was booked on charges of making a terrorist threat to Windcrest Elementary School in northeastern San Antonio. She is free on bail.
After receiving the phoned threat that was left on the school‘s voicemail, school officials evacuated the campus of more than 700 students. A thorough search of the school and it’s grounds revealed that there were no explosives, police said.
The reason given for Brewster’s ouster from the campus was because her daughter did not leave permission for her to visit her grandchildren at school, officials said.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
The Death of Death Panels
It’s usually hard to kill of something that doesn’t exist.
There may not be any death panels, but the rumor that there are such panels just won’t lie down and die no matter how many people from the president on down say it “just isn’t so.”
It’s like trying to stop any rumor, like Elvis lives, which then becomes urban legend, which too many people believe.
If there really were death panels, I be the first to apply for a job on one, because not allowing someone to die or to make his or her own decisions about his or her own end-of-life is as bad as forcing someone to hang on who’s in severely ill and wants to released from his or her pain and suffering.
What it really is -- and something that’s been a MediCare provision for more than 20 years -- is informing patients about their end-of-life options, Living Wills and that sort of thing, which MediCare will pay for.
What is beyond my comprehension is “paying for that service.”
Or experience with a family member who suffered a severe stroke several years ago was this:
During the six agonizing years he survived after a stroke, he must have been seen by two dozen or more different doctors.
Along every step of the way, each doctor told us what his options were after the initial prognosis of “you might want to think about pulling the plug,” because his chances of survival are slim to none.
“Slim to none” turned out to be six miserable years that involved convalescent homes, two doctors forced upon us by his insurance company that were so bad I had to get a restraining order against them to prevent them from coming anywhere near him, several surgeries, feeding tubes, diapers and all kinds of dehumanizing, humiliating experiences for him to endure.
Enduring all that was okay by him, but for a huge number of people it wouldn’t be okay.
They would choose to refuse all treatment including antibiotics that were really what was keep him alive by killing off the myriad of infections that kept attacking his withering body, and that’s where things like Living Will and specific instructions come in.
This is why it is so important for each person -- even the young, not just us old codgers and coderesses -- to plan in advance and decide how we want to exit the world.
The simple act of refusing antibiotics would have put a quick end to the whole affair, because he would have gotten pneumonia and been gone within two or three weeks.
I won’t even go into the expenses involved in keeping a “dead person lying” alive, except to say that in California when you qualify for the MediCal supplement to MediCare, the States places a lien on all property, which must eventually be sold off and the money paid to the State.
In our case, the expenses amassed are more than $5 million dollars and no one except a Got Rocks like the Wall Street thieves and their ilk can afford to stay alive to die anyway days, weeks, months or years down the road.
Six years in a convalescent home to the tune of forty grand a month…and that doesn’t count all the doctors, hospitals and other expenses along the way.
At the end when he went into an irrevocable coma and the antibiotics no longer had any effect, the attending physicians of which there were three, because none of them worked more than three days in a row, still kept informing us of our options.
Not once in that entire six years did any doctor charge us for end-of-life counseling.
So unless you make an appointment with an attorney or with a doctor to take up his office time to specifically discuss the mater, I don’t understand where these charges come from.
Yes, you have to pay for a Living Will just as you have to pay for any last will and testiment, but not for the advice about getting one.
The advice we got was FREE and usually received while we were standing in the hall outside our relative’s room.
There may not be any death panels, but the rumor that there are such panels just won’t lie down and die no matter how many people from the president on down say it “just isn’t so.”
It’s like trying to stop any rumor, like Elvis lives, which then becomes urban legend, which too many people believe.
If there really were death panels, I be the first to apply for a job on one, because not allowing someone to die or to make his or her own decisions about his or her own end-of-life is as bad as forcing someone to hang on who’s in severely ill and wants to released from his or her pain and suffering.
What it really is -- and something that’s been a MediCare provision for more than 20 years -- is informing patients about their end-of-life options, Living Wills and that sort of thing, which MediCare will pay for.
What is beyond my comprehension is “paying for that service.”
Or experience with a family member who suffered a severe stroke several years ago was this:
During the six agonizing years he survived after a stroke, he must have been seen by two dozen or more different doctors.
Along every step of the way, each doctor told us what his options were after the initial prognosis of “you might want to think about pulling the plug,” because his chances of survival are slim to none.
“Slim to none” turned out to be six miserable years that involved convalescent homes, two doctors forced upon us by his insurance company that were so bad I had to get a restraining order against them to prevent them from coming anywhere near him, several surgeries, feeding tubes, diapers and all kinds of dehumanizing, humiliating experiences for him to endure.
Enduring all that was okay by him, but for a huge number of people it wouldn’t be okay.
They would choose to refuse all treatment including antibiotics that were really what was keep him alive by killing off the myriad of infections that kept attacking his withering body, and that’s where things like Living Will and specific instructions come in.
This is why it is so important for each person -- even the young, not just us old codgers and coderesses -- to plan in advance and decide how we want to exit the world.
The simple act of refusing antibiotics would have put a quick end to the whole affair, because he would have gotten pneumonia and been gone within two or three weeks.
I won’t even go into the expenses involved in keeping a “dead person lying” alive, except to say that in California when you qualify for the MediCal supplement to MediCare, the States places a lien on all property, which must eventually be sold off and the money paid to the State.
In our case, the expenses amassed are more than $5 million dollars and no one except a Got Rocks like the Wall Street thieves and their ilk can afford to stay alive to die anyway days, weeks, months or years down the road.
Six years in a convalescent home to the tune of forty grand a month…and that doesn’t count all the doctors, hospitals and other expenses along the way.
At the end when he went into an irrevocable coma and the antibiotics no longer had any effect, the attending physicians of which there were three, because none of them worked more than three days in a row, still kept informing us of our options.
Not once in that entire six years did any doctor charge us for end-of-life counseling.
So unless you make an appointment with an attorney or with a doctor to take up his office time to specifically discuss the mater, I don’t understand where these charges come from.
Yes, you have to pay for a Living Will just as you have to pay for any last will and testiment, but not for the advice about getting one.
The advice we got was FREE and usually received while we were standing in the hall outside our relative’s room.
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