At The Gates of Old Age

By Carol Mell, 10-24-07

When you reach the gates of old age an angel hands you a slip of paper that reads,

“Good for passage through these gates on one condition—you must first get a colonoscopy.”

“Huh? How does that work?” you ask the angel in the surgical mask blocking the gate with a flaming high-tech scope thingy.

“If you want to live to be a grandma, to prove yourself worthy you must first perform a series of tests.”

“But they’ve been trying to pop my mammary organs like fat ticks for a decade,” I protest.

“Yes,” the angel said, “but there are more trials to come, enough to deflate your femininity, trample your painted toenails and make you explore your core, um, beliefs,” the angel admonishes then disappears down what looks like a hospital hall, a place I’ve come for another regrettable test even though I’m not sick.

These are not the trials prescribed for fairy tale princesses, which according to my aura I definitely was in a past life. What about all those Disney movie girls who only face little obstacles like dragons and wicked stepmothers? All Cinderella and Snow White had to do was find a handsome prince to unleash their inner princess. Once a girl’s inner beauty was revealed, according to Disney, she was recognized by her true love, or a Hollywood agent, and lived happily ever after.

No one said anything about testing for internal dragons in the happily-ever-after part of the story I’m living now.  It doesn’t seem fair. I did the first part right, I found my true love and although he is a Cancer, he’s benign. As for my inner princess, she’s a Pisces who swims around all day without cares. She never could figure out why the Littlest Mermaid would want to give up her fins to become a human who would need a knee replacement someday.

In the old days people breezed through the gates of old age without a ticket, carefree and with their dignity intact even if they didn’t get far past the gates before being felled by a heart attack, stroke or a plain bolt of lightning.

I don’t know if it is true but I’ve heard that more people die of cancer nowadays because they are not dying of other stuff first. In other words, the longer we live the more threats we have to face and the more tests you have to take, tests that will leave you anxious, limp, troubled and broke but alive for another year. 

As I wrote in a previous column, my Dad left the mountains after a stroke but refused any but the most basic tests and headed home.

“As long as you got money,” he said, “they got tests.”

That’s it. Health insurance is the trouble. Baby boomers take it for granted that the longer we live the better and if we’ve got the insurance we do the preventative tests, exposing ourselves to radiation, puncturing our veins for blood samples, and inserting snake-like camera devices in sensitive places. Our own health insurance is so hot on tests that they pay us to take them.

Judging by the commercials during the boomer-focused news hour, colonoscopies are only one of many, many trials confronting us at the portal of old age. In high definition color, commercials detail night sweats, vaginal dryness, wrinkles around the eyes, erectile dysfunction, osteoporosis, restless legs, diabetes, faulty plumbing, acid reflux, constipation, bloating, gas, sinus, depression and various -ectomies and -otomies that a few years ago I never dreamed of in my worst nightmares.

Fortunately, the advertisers tell us with pleasant music and an audible sigh of relief, solutions abound. Blue pills, big purple pills, pills that do two things at once, heart pills, green butterflies, French bees and discreet adult diapers stand like sentinels at the ready to protect us, reminding us to tell our doctors if our hearts stop, our skin falls off or our brains swell as “these may be rare but serious side effects.” My body is going to need an engineer with all the holes that need filling, seeps that need pumping, mountains that need leveling, rivers that need damming and winds that need taming.

Just when I was ready to abandon all hope, I caught some good news. Around the country, it seems, officials are discussing a ban on men’s saggy pants, like the one in Atlanta, that would make butt cracks illegal. That would mean we women would be the bearers of all legal cleavage. Save the red hats, boomer women will burn our bras a second time, and this time it’s not because we know we look better without them. This time, we’ll be shedding the shackles of the patriarchy because we’ve taken the tests of life and passed with flying colors. We got the deep cleavage to prove it.

You are danged if you do and danged if you don’t on Humbug Mountain so you might just as well.