Old Age Hurts

 My sisters Linda and Patty are here at my father's home in St. Cloud, Florida taking care of my father's situation as he tries to recover from his recent surgery.  They were going over his diet according to a pamphlet called "2200 Calorie Diabetic Cardiac Diet."  Just hearing all the do's and don'ts' made me dizzy.  My sisters are so nice and dedicated to drop their lives in Connecticut to come down here and take care of him.  My Dad will be 85 this July and is recovering from the double-by-pass surgery he had a couple of months ago.  He finds walking difficult but he refuses to use the walker.  As I wrote in a poem tonight, he wobbled into the kitchen where I was on my MacBook to get some chocolate pudding on two occasions.  Each time, taking the lid off was difficult for him but you could see in his eyes that he didn't want any help with it.

My step-mother Jenny just turned 88 and has been in the hospital for some time with digestive problems.  My father said she has "down-syndrome"- meaning everything she eats immediately goes down and out of her.  She has developed some digestive-related staff infection and is fighting that off now to the best of her ability.  She is very skinny- perhaps under 80 pounds.  It is difficult to see their lives slowly slipping away.

They are both strong-willed.  About ten years ago, Jenny had a kidney and much of her intestines removed, along with a grapefruit-sized malignant tumor.  About five years ago, she broke her hip during a hurricane.  Someone knocked on the door in the middle of the night to see if my Dad and her were all right.  They both got up in the dark and my father accidently knocked her over while walking to answer the door.  "Thanks for being so concerned," my father sarcastically told the neighbors.  She had already had one hip replaced years before and was a long time sufferer of osteoporosis.   Somehow she has trudged on.  

My Dad must be very strong to survive the kind of surgery he got at his progressed age. I couldn't believe they were giving a man of that advanced age such invasive surgery.  They basically saw your chest open, stop your heart and do the procedure before sewing you back up again.  I knew a man who had the same procedure in his forties and said it felt like an elephant was on top of him when he woke up.  

Dad has been stubborn about rehab.  It must be very depressing for him to not be able to work in his workshop and build the "dummies" that used to "work" in his yard at tasks like climbing a ladder or mowing the lawn.  They were a hit of the neighborhood.  He usually is a million laughs a minute but now he doesn't have much to say.  It's a very difficult time of life for him.  When I first went into his room, he asked me how me and the family was doing and then became transfixed in WWE (Wrestling).  I have to leave at seven tomorrow morning and feel bad I can't spend any more time with him. 

The material world is a painful place.  I am really committed to getting fit and taking care of my health because I want to avoid as many complications as possible when I get older.  I want to live to a healthy, productive and ripe old age, man.  Of course, there are no guarantees for the material body other than the fact that it will eventually get old and die.  That is assured.