Geriatric Teenagers

I may or may not have written a blog post or two in the past about my experience with doctors. I’m not entirely sure. I rarely re-read my posts after I have published them. When I do read them I think “Huh! I have no recollection of having written that.” I’m not sure if that is just from having a lot on my plate and consequently a very full brain or if it is a sign of my aging mind emptying out, like the slow leak we discovered in one of our bathroom pipes. Lately I’m leaning toward the latter, especially since it came to my attention recently that I am much older than I realized.

A few months ago Grant and I received separate letters from our health insurance provider with our newly assigned primary care physicians because apparently you have to declare this somewhere instead of just regularly going to the same doctor for a period of time. “I declare you my doctor!” Sign here and here and here.

According to the letters, Grant’s assigned doctor is named April and her office is just a few miles away. MY assigned doctor is named Eric and he is much farther away. 

He is also a geriatric doctor. 

Where in the flying fuck was this nonsense coming from? I pondered writing a nasty letter of protest to my health insurance company.  Grant is much much older than me, by a whole year and a half! And he goes to the doctor much more often than I do. I typically have to be on my deathbed to go. So it seems logical that HE would be assigned the geriatric doctor and I would get to go see Doctor April, who sounds like she might be refreshing, like a spring rain. I pictured Doctor Eric saying things like: “How is your flexibility and have you thought about doing some chair yoga?” And I answer in my mind: “Doctor Eric, I happened to be able to do a downward facing dog withOUT the use of a chair, thank you very much. You can fuck off.”  

I literally could not let it go. The fact that I’m writing about this tells you the level of obsessing over what would be obvious to any sound minded person as a simple clerical error.

First of all, I actually  already have a primary care person and finding her came with great effort and a lot of bad experiences. 

Ever since my wonderful ob/gyn doctor retired, just after our youngest was born (who is now almost 19 years old) my experience with doctors has been rocky. Doctor M not only helped me birth six babies, he also stood in as my primary care doc and sometimes mental health counselor. He got me through adult chickenpox (which nearly killed me), strep throat, and one particularly bad bout of postpartum. The man was a no nonsense healer who listened to me and gave solid advice for my health and well being. I miss him so much. He never once told me I had a pale vagina or performed a pregnancy test without asking me if I thought I was pregnant like one particularly psychotic doctor did. She wanted to put me on hormone supplements, that I later discovered she was making a fortune off of, when all my pale vagina and I really needed was a nice sunny vacation somewhere. I mean who WOULDN’T be a little off color having six kids? The woman literally yelled at me when I declined this treatment saying “It’s literally just YAMS.” To this day, I can not eat yams without thinking about my vagina.

A few years after that experience, I found another doctor and decided I would be proactive by drawing a picture of my body for her with little bubbles of words pointing to the areas I was concerned about so that we could be clear about what to treat and what NOT to treat. Plus, this way, in my nervous state of white coat agitation,  I would remember what I was worried about.  Nowhere on my body diagram was there any concern for my vagina: she is still insecure from all that racist hatred. But because there had been a large gap of time between the crazy doctor and this one,  there were about forty two other areas of concern, including a bad hair style, which I realize is not a doctor thing but I thought maybe she would find it funny. An ice breaker of sorts.

When I handed her the picture, she briefly tore her gaze away from her laptop to look at it briefly and then frowned and said: “We can only talk about three things during this visit.” Not a giggle, not a smile, just a frowny face looking over her glasses at me like I was some kind of psychiatric patient. She didn’t even read the forty-two things to help me narrow it down to the most important three, as though that were up to me, the one who is NOT the doctor.

Two more years went by without a doctor and Grant, in exasperation, handed me a list of doctors in our network who were accepting new patients. The very first name on the list was someone named Serenity, a physician’s assistant. I circled her name and mentally declared her my primary care physician based solely on the fact that I love the word serenity. Surely she would be a perfect fit. And then I filed the list away for another day. 

But apparently my health insurance company needed something more than just a circled name on a piece of paper. Perhaps, based on my history with doctors, they figured that by the time I actually set an appointment, I would be old enough to see Doctor Eric.

Sixty five is the age at which, from the chronological viewpoint of the medical profession, you are considered to be in need of health care for the aging, aka geriatrics. I am NOT 65. I’m 56. But in typing that out, I realize that the person who made the clerical error is clearly dyslexic. So I mostly forgive them. 

Though I’m not a huge fan of labels, if I had to put one on my age group it would be “geriatric teenagers”. We’re new to being older and some of us aren’t even on the cusp of being wise, not having entirely adjusted to being on the other side of middle age and still feeling like we have something to prove to ourselves and to the world. And while I have mostly grown out of the tantrums and door slamming from my first round of teen years, the word ageism resonates a bit more for me these days. I sometimes find myself in victim mode, agitated for not feeling like I am heard, understood, treated fairly or appreciated. This of course is the human condition at every stage of life, with or without a label, so I’m not special or different. Which is and of itself annoying to accept.

Jonathan Swift, a priest, poet, and politician born in the 1600’s and maybe most famous for “Gulliver’s Travels” wrote “No wise person ever wanted to be younger.” For me this is SO true! I LOVE being me at my age. And the older I get, the happier and more content I grow. So I’m really not sure why I got so prickly about the geriatric doctor assignment. I guess I just want to age on MY terms, not at the whim of some dyslexic administrator. Though maybe this person is fifty six too and ALSO sometimes forgets to turn off the stove after use or apply mascara to BOTH sets of eyelashes, etc etc. My point is, while I really shouldn’t have anything to prove at this age, I still have a lot to accomplish. It feels quite frankly like I’m just getting started! So I am working on not getting caught up in worrying about wrinkles or memory loss or dressing for my age or whether or not my kids think I’m cool or if I’m relevant in the workforce. These things only become obstacles to the shit I have left to accomplish if I let them.

Because serenity is a quest for me and I really want to try and be healthy for all the things I want to do in the second half of my life, I finally went to see Serenity. She was as lovely as her name, though fourteen seems really young to be a physician’s assistant and I found myself wondering if Doctor Eric was older and more relatable to my teenage geriatric phase or if all healthcare people were fourteen now. I brought with me a plain, boring index card where I had written down the three things I was most worried about, hoping they were the most important things to be concerned about. And she did something amazing. She said: “Let’s deal with these three things first and then you can come back for a full wellcheck. That way we take care of you AND appease the health insurance company.” But then she said “Now. Let’s talk about the importance for people your age to have flexibility. Have you considered chair yoga?”

GAH!