Observation

I learned the other day that my mother will almost certainly have to have kidney dialysis for the rest of her life. I say 'almost' because I've noticed that doctors who specialize in one area tend to assume that you're going to do everything they say, and what they say is that you should do everything they think required to maintain health in their area. They're aware that people tend to accept less than optimum in health, but they don't think that way.

So when a nephrologist said that she'd need dialysis "three times a week for the rest of her life", I immediately thought "two or three times". The reason I thought that was simple: odds are very good that it's going to be me taking her to those sessions, and I don't want to do it. Not that I have a choice. It's going to be tedious -- just getting her to the car (has to be the car; she can't step high enough to get into the minivan) takes effort; I'm sure that getting her into the facility will be arduous, and will most likely involve scouting out a wheelchair on arrival, transfer to it, and only then actually getting into the facility. Then, three to four hours later, which is enough time to be an interruption but not enough time to do anything that can't be done quickly, the whole process, in reverse; only then, she's going to be very tired. There will probably be complaints during the trip about the process, too. I'm not going to like it, but there's no alternative. We don't have staff to foist this off on, and this is, after all, my mother.

What bothers me most about all of this, though, is that this is an indicator of what it can be like to grow old and feeble. There are damn few people who grow old and look like the people who populate the AARP ads, all bright smiles and firm bodies, well groomed, leaning on a golf putter or reading in an overstuffed leather chair. That's no more most people's old age than Donna Reed's vacuuming while wearing pearls and high heels was most people's home life. I don't recall ever thinking about it as a kid, but I guess I would have assumed that Reed's life was just different. In her life, pearls and heels were common. In mine, they weren't. Now, when I see those ubiquitous ads for AARP and aging, generally, I see the people who inhabit Reed's later years, but not mine. I don't ever expect to look like that. I don't even expect to look like my father, who was pretty active all of his life. Probably, my grandfather, who was content to sit, smoke a pipe, and watch television. That's fine with me.

But the idea that my life could devolve into bedpans and machinery cleaning my blood, having to impose on people to take me to scores of doctors offices, deal with medical facilities for whom I'm just one more sick old person: that scares the hell out of me.