Pain of the Month Club

When I was a much younger man old people really got on my nerves. For purposes of this discussion I will define “old” as people at least 60 years old. My sister Paula and I used to roll our eyes at each other every time Mom and Dad invited some of their friends over for dinner. We knew what was coming. For old people dinner time conversation invariably degraded into an episode of General Hospital. It would go something like this:

Mom: I talked with Erma yesterday and the poor woman is struggling with the colitis again.

Geezer #1: That poor thing. And its not like George can take care of her what with his sugar diabetes.

Geezer #2: You know I told George to go see a specialist back when he got that hernia in his groin but he tried to tough it out and now look at him.

Dad: Well at least neither of us picked up that Whooping cough when it was going around back in the Spring.

Mom: Maybe not, but I declare honestly, I would rather have the whooping cough than have to put up with sugar diabetes.

Needless to say, this sort of dinner time conversation didn’t exactly aid in digestion. But it seemed that every single time my parents got together with their friends all they talked about was their interminable list of ailments. Fast forward roughly 50 years to the sorry state that I now find myself in.

It is a humbling experience when you recognize your parent’s behavior in yourself, especially when you become guilty of the very same things they did that bugged the daylights out of you. Unfortunately, I have discovered the reason behind their often tortured dinner time accounts. Here’s the deal…since I have been in my 60’s literally every month of my life brings some new physical irritant onto the scene. I will wake up one morning and out of the blue one of my feet feels like I spent the entire night walking across a football field full of Legos. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared it will vanish just about the time I’ve decided it might be time to go see a doctor. Then, the next month it will be an unexplained throbbing pain in my left thumb…I’m not making this up. For weeks I will go back and forth on whether or not I should go get it looked at and then BAMM…its gone, replaced by a burning sensation in my left hip which turns up out of thin air. It occurs to me that if I went to the doctor each time my body sprouts a new pain I might as well see if they will set up a cot for me in the back room.

So I was thinking that I need to do something proactively to spare my own children from having to endure the same kinds of dinner conversations I grew up with. Suppose I could start a chat room of some kind strictly for those of us over the age of 60 where we could all gather to discuss all of our most recent physical humiliations amongst ourselves—sort of like a safe space for seniors to discuss our health woes. I was thinking of calling it the Pain of the Month Club. As soon as you wake up with hair suddenly growing out of your—I don’t know—-eyeballs, you could just log in and get the conversation rolling with:

Me: Hey guys! Didn’t somebody here have hair that started growing out of their earlobes so bad they had to start braiding it? Well, top this—-this past week hair started growing out of my left eyeball!!

Then 30 minutes later when you discover that you aren’t alone, that in fact people have noticed hair growing out of every single orifice of the body since they started on Social Security, you’ve gotten it all out of your system and the horrifying subject need never be spoken of again around the children.

I’m determined people. I am not going to be like my parents at the dinner table!!!