I'm bored with your illness!

I admit it: as baby boomers, our age group is beginning to have aches and pains today that hadn’t taken over our lives ten, twenty, thirty years ago. However what is making me crazy is that they must talk about it all the time!  I confess that BFF hubby and I might have as many ailments as anybody has…...but here it is…. I’m sorry to say I’m bored with your illness! (Grin)

Sure we all go to the doctors, and probably most of us take some medications, more than likely to control our cholesterol and high blood pressure. Unfortunately as we age so do our friends. And I am aware that with aging come health problems more often than not serious.

But I ask you, why must we talk about it endlessly? Why do people feel that this is appropriate dinner conversation?  Do you think we are just waiting with baited breathe to hear about your latest probe or MRI? I recently listened to this person’s entire medical history while waiting in line at the grocery store. Granted I am aware that not only do I live in a senior community and I am surrounded by two (2) others, but to be held hostage in the checkout line listening to a colonoscopy story is too much for even me.  This woman went on to share her advice as to the best doctors for all sorts of various ailments.  To which I politely said, I really don’t like discussing my ailments, I am just thrilled when they are behind me and I can get on with my life.  Dead silence, she then said with a huff, well you youngsters are a different breed and stuck her nose in the air as if there was something wrong with me.  I am sure there is, but I refrained from telling her all about it. (Grin) Please don’t get me wrong this is not an aversion to someone’s kindness in asking you about a recent surgery or illness, and as to how you are recovering, or you doing the same.

Maybe you don’t agree, but I’m an optimistic person and I prefer to laugh and discuss fun relevant topics, taking my mind off of my problems. Particularly at a dinner or when I am out at social events. Ok maybe I live in my own world, but that’s Ok they know me there and understand the rules. (Grin)

Oh come on now, you know it’s the elephant in the room, and unless you are the one doing the talking you too would like to tell them, stop I don’t want to hear this anymore. I frankly find it depressing. Yes I am aware that we are all getting older, believe me I feel it.  I heard the best response the other day from a good friend, it made me smile and laugh, she said that aging isn’t for sissies? 

I am not sure if all this doom and gloom illness talk springs from our society, where we perhaps are taught to equate happiness with youth, and assume that sorrow, illness and desperation goes with aging.  It however makes me wonder if some people just enjoy being miserable, or at least make far more out of life’s discomforts than of its pleasant things. 

I have to say it has gotten so bad that I cringe and hold my breath when I run into someone and utter the simple greeting; how are you today.  I am fearful those words will elicit a long recital of their personal ills; and I know I won’t escape from the conversation until they fill me in with a dismal catalogue of the distresses and sufferings of their friends’ and family!   

Is it just me, or do most people in a retirement community really feel there is some sort of merit in having ailments or afflictions to speak of to others? As if it makes them part of the group.   It appears to me that they think it an altogether undesirable and unworthy state to be well, with nothing to complain of.  They appear to me to be the happiest—only when something is wrong with them.  I, as were most boomers, was raised to tough it out; when you are ill you did not whine, you just put on your brave face and kept going. I was raised with a stoical, carry on approach to illness, you’re not bleeding, so get up and go to school, or work.Some of the experts say this is a way for people to be the center of attention.  You would get my attention faster by telling me a humorous antidote or a funny story.

So after all of this rambling on, I am sure I have begun to sound like a curmudgeon, with not a sympathetic bone in my body. But honestly that is the furthest thing from the truth, I very much care about people, and am extremely empathetic, wishing them good health. But here is where I have to say that I believe that laughter is really the best medicine, and good for what ails you.  I don’t mind a story of illness when a person makes it humorous and shows that it isn’t defining who they are.  I find that it is important to try and laugh every single day in order to gain the most physical and mental health benefits in that day.  

The experts say that people tend to laugh more when in groups, so I say surround yourself with others who laugh because laughter is after all contagious.  We watched the old Lucy routine where she is working on the candy line in a club presentation, everyone in the room was laughing. I noted that people left smiling and seemed more upbeat after that.

I think with laugher you find yourself so happy you forget to talk about what ails you. The best reason I heard the experts say  for laughing  was; laughing for 10 minutes each day can burn the same number of calories as a half hour workout. How cool is that? The experts also say that laughter is a benefit in Pain Reduction – Laughter allows a person to “forget” about pains such as those associated with aches, arthritis, etc. In 1987 Texas Tech psychologist Rosemary Cogan used the discomfort of a pressure cuff to test the medical benefits of laughter on pain management subjects who watched a 20 minute Lily Tomlin routine, and found the could tolerate a tighter cuff than those who had watched no tape at all.

My take away: and here is a clue to my fellow Boomers, perhaps you should consider that to others talking about your aches and pains is, frankly, a pain in the butt.(Grin) Your seasonal allergies and kidney stones are not really interesting, and to quote my grandkids “No Body Cares.”   And it is this bloggers opinion that you may feel a whole lot better if you kept your illness to yourself, and instead regaled us with stories of your grandkids, movie or latest book you are reading,
a TV program, or something you found humorous. No fair trying to slip in a latest surgery story in the guise of a debate on rising health care costs! (Grin) 

Emerson says on this same subject: "If you have not slept well, or if you have a headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or any other ailment—I beseech you to hold your peace!"  In reality isn’t the most important thing to enjoy life, to be happy, it seems to me that matters more than regaling you with my latest illness.  So perhaps when someone begins to drone on and on about their latest illness, maybe we should help take their mind off of it by throwing in something humorous such as my friends husband did; my friend has bounced back from cancer, heart problems, even a stroke. Through it all, she and her husband, have kept their sense of humor. One day she said, you know what kills me? Smiling, her husband teased, apparently nothing. I love and admire them so much and try to be more like them in how they choose to live life. Every time you find laughter in a difficult situation, you win.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. — (Mark Twain) and as Abraham Lincoln said: with the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I would die.

And so I strive to incorporate laughter into my daily life; and I am a person who gets better with practice. I think getting older is awesome-because well I get more practice. (Grin)  And as my 92 years young- mother in-law says; in the end it’s not the years in your life, but the life in your years. (By the way she never complains about her heath she is grateful for each day and says that pain reminds her she is alive)….. And so I leave you with this, I wish you a long and successful life. I wish you excellent health. Most importantly, I wish you happiness – without measure – every day and beseech you to remember, laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects, so please take it regularly!

I thank you again for taking this retirement journey with me, or as I refer to it, “my longest coffee break."  I'm just sayin’…