by Julie Danis

All the doctors sang the same tune, “You’re getting older.” Generally, I didn’t think I looked or felt like I was approaching 50, whatever that is suppose to look and feel like. But it’s difficult to feel young when the diagnosis is “old.” I did feel sweaty at night, hot during the day and generally irritable all the time, which my young female gynecologist shrugged off: “it’s all part of getting older, each woman experiences peri-menopause differently, we don’t know how long hot flashes last.” I wish she had expressed a little more sympathy, or empathy, or something to soften the blow of impending crone-dom. Maybe she was embarrassed that the medical community hadn’t figured this whole thing out by now.

I knew I couldn’t escape aging but it was getting harder and harder to ignore. I needed my glasses to read the alarm clock. I needed physical therapy to recover from exercise. Memory slips happened more frequently. I needed physical therapy to recover from exercise.

My girlfriends and I laughed about our shared age-related activities because as Clarence Darrow said, “If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.” We may have lost the reason we walked into the kitchen with a pen in the hand, but we still wanted to be able to think it through. While we laughed together, I secretly worried. Sometimes I stumbled when I walked. Just down the street, up a flight of steps, when I went to the kitchen with a pen in my hand. I tried not to worry myself into bad health – something I think my mother had a knack for –and blamed everything on estrogen or lack thereof.

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