Guest ElderBlogger: Frank Paynter

[EDITOR'S NOTE: While I am away for a few days, five fantastic elders agreed to guest blog here at Time Goes By. Twice in the past, Frank Paynter of Listics has filled in for me and now it feels like tradition, so I invited him back again. Frank neglected to title this piece, so I am calling it, My Feet Hurt. Please welcome Frank with plenty of kudos and comments.]

My feet hurt. My ankles are misshapen, deformed. It's congenital. My flat feet saved my life, kept me home from Vietnam. But that's the upside. The downside is I've never been a very fast runner, a very long jumper, and I dance like I have two left feet.

A month or so ago I bought two new pairs of shoes. I was listless, willing to be sold, and I accepted arch supports different from "my brand" the one that has kept the pain at bay the last few years. I knew what I needed but somehow let this shoe salesman sell me something more expensive, cooler looking, and for me useless.

I needed Spencos. I knew this. I've used them for the last few years since a foot doctor recommended them. Let me sing the praises of the Spenco arch support, a simple device that - when I finally found it - eased the terrible pains in my feet and ankles that I've felt all my adult life.

A few weeks later I discarded the useless but cool looking arch supports, returned to the shoe store, bought the simple green Spencos and began to limp along the road to recovery although, sadly, not before I'd done some real damage. Excuse me while I go pop an aspirin or two.

I'm overweight, clinically obese to tell the truth. If I lost fifty pounds I'd be back where I was when I was overweight twenty years ago in my early forties. Carrying an extra fifty or sixty pounds now doesn't help the foot problem. You'd think I'd do something about it.

Can you tell I've been depressed lately? What a great time to take a shot at writing a guest blog posting for Ronni. Still, these ill feelings certainly strip away any delusions, color the pink clouds a more realistic gray, and if the sun only shines for eight hours a day in these parts, at least it's bitterly cold to make up for it. Didn't get above zero all day today.

Why have you been depressed, Frank?

Time goes by.

When I was a kid, and by that I mean my childhood progressing until a time well into my thirties, we either didn't know about SPF or we didn't care much. I'm a redhead, or I was. If you check out the parts of my beard that haven't turned gray you can see the color.

I always seemed to burn long before I tanned. I experienced that stinging painful sunburn that eventually peels away in great sheets and burns again. So now I have skin cancer. No worries really, none of the varieties that they've identified are the scary kind... no melanoma, thank goodness. But, it needs to be treated and on doctor's orders I smeared my arms with Fluorouracil morning and night for three weeks. You should have seen those little cancerous lesions light up. Where before I had a few rough spots on my forearms, I now had big red welts. By the end of the treatment, well - you don't want to know. It's gross.

Consider chemotherapy. It's something we do because the alternative is worse than doing nothing. During this treatment, my ankles ached terribly. Reading the side effects it says nothing about aching ankles. Therefore the aching ankles were from inappropriate orthotics, right? Still when you read this about the goo that you're smearing on your arm, it gives you second thoughts:

”Many medicines have not been studied specifically in older people. Therefore, it may not be known whether they work exactly the same way they do in younger adults. Although there is no specific information comparing use of fluorouracil in the elderly with use in other age groups, it is not expected to cause different side effects or problems in older people than it does in younger adults.”

Did you read Ronni's recent post about Professor James (Mengele) Miller's proposal that elders be permitted drugs that haven't passed the FDA testing protocols, indeed that elders be considered a test group, and if it doesn't kill us then maybe it's safe for the youngsters? Scary stuff.

Managed care is scary stuff too. There's no individuality in the doctor/patient relationship in a managed care setting. Delivery of medical care according to the scientific management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor seems more fitting for a science fiction story than for real life. I guess this shows how far we have come.

I'd trade "managed care" for a decent jet-pack or a flight to the moon though.