6:13am February 14, 2014

Age and feeding tubes.

This is feeding tube awareness week. I don’t generally go in for awareness days and stuff, but feeding tubes are something where awareness can actually save people’s lives, without anything else changing. I didn’t expect this post to be about feeding tubes, but it is, so in case I don’t write another post this week, there’s this one. I’m reposting this because I messed up the tags in the first one.

I’m turning 34 this year. That isn’t old even by normal standards, and I live in a place that’s mostly retirees, so even 50 is considered quite young here. But I’m starting to notice tiny signs of aging nonetheless.

I’ve had a few (and I mean only a few, if my hair weren’t coarse and near-black they probably wouldn’t even show up) grey hairs for a few years now. And I’m starting to notice the tiniest signs of wrinkles and other changes in my skin. And when I talk about certain medical complaints, I notice nurses sometimes make offhand comments about “that’s what happens as you start aging”. Not that I look old, they assure me if I ask, but they never used to talk about ‘aging’ before, and suddenly they were all talking about it, so I’m assuming I’m starting to look mid-thirties.

And I love it.

I’m not writing this to complain. I’m writing this because the idea of becoming older is absurdly happy to me.

Partly I’ve always liked the way middle-age and older people looked, better than the way I like how young people look. There’s more variation. I have more chance of telling people apart.

I once read a dystopian novel that shall remain nameless because I didn’t like it very much. Fans will recognize it and to other people it doesn’t matter. I’m not a huge fan of dystopia, and I didn’t even slightly enjoy reading it, even though I actually enjoyed some of the concepts in it. I think inertia is the only reason I read it through.

Anyway, a character from one of the poorest parts of an extremely poor and oppressed town goes to a city full of rich people. She notices that they all make a lot of effort to look young, to the point of surgery and all kinds of painful and intense body modification. And she says:

In [my town], looking old is something of an achievement since so many people die early. You see an elder person, you want to congratulate them on their longevity, ask the secret of survival.

And I think that’s the other part of it for me, the bigger part. Without a feeding tube, I’d be either very sick or dead by now. So I’ll consider old age an achievement, not a given. I’ve basically considered every day since the feeding tube kind of a bonus add-on to what life could have been. And I’m much happier as a result.

So I look in the mirror and sometimes I get a glimpse of a grey hair or two, and very fine, very faint wrinkles in my forehead that didn’t used to be there. Or sometimes I just notice that I look older than I used to, and I can’t pin it down. Or I get an image in my mind of what I’ll look like when I hit middle age or old age. And it’s a little disorienting, mostly because I’m not used to seeing those things in the mirror. But mostly, it makes me happy. And without the feeding tube, that wouldn’t be happening.

Feeding tubes don’t give you a living death the way a few of the doctors acted when I was about to get one. They give you a chance to be alive. Sometimes even a chance to grow old.