Am I just a sockeye?

I am struggling right now. I am just 51 years old. I understand a few centuries ago this would have been considered a ripe old age. However, by today’s standard I am a young man. Unfortunately, no one told my body about it. Aches and pains are standard fare for me nowadays. I am at the stage where I cannot listen to any public recital of symptoms for any ailment without immediately noting that I am thusly afflicted. In fact I not only have the symptoms, I also have the great fortune to already revel in the plethora of side effects that accompany an advertised medical treatment. I want to make it perfectly clear. I am not a hypochondriac. My former doctor was convinced that I was, so I was not able to seek regress through him. He once hosted an intern and part of the training was to allow the intern to interview the patient before the doctor returned for the main appointment. When the doctor did return we had already amassed an entire page of ailments and another page of tests to be ordered. I had started at the top of my head and was working down and had only gotten to my waist. What lay beneath my waist was a real mess but it wasn’t to be. The doctor knowingly took the papers away, admonished his young charge, killing all hopes of an impending panacea.

I could go on about how my body has betrayed me, but I know it is I that betrayed my body. Here I will relate the self inflicted crimes to which I now pay penance. As a young man, bravado would necessitate picking up any object on a dare. Proper lifting techniques were for sissies. To empty a freezer before moving it was an insult. Padless tackle football was fun. Now it is payback time claimed by abused joints and tendons.

Even more offensive to my worldly vessel was a lifestyle of sheer gluttony. Tens of thousands of calories were consumed in short order. The closer the natural state of my intake was to pure glucose the more often it crossed my palate. Why savour one of those gooey Cadbury Easter eggs when you could eat nine at one sitting. Anything short of 16 ounces of steak was dismissed as eating like a pansy. These days as I never entertain a helping of seconds was once eclipsed by three trips to the buffet table. I may as well have taken a ballpeen hammer to my pancreas instead of prolonging the abuse. The high metabolism that maintained a reasonable figure of a young man masked the inner damage that was slowly accumulating.

I became enraptured with my Beloved and matrimony quickly ensued followed within the first year by the birth of my first child. This coincided with the slowing of my metabolism. As I am a sensitive and caring man I gained 10 lbs of sympathy weight with my first offspring and each of the next two lives I helped bring into the world. For the next 15 years my wife accurately made a point that she wasn’t married to 30 lbs of me. This extra mass only slowed me down as well as put greater stresses on various parts.
I became more of a spectator than a participant in athletic endeavors.

The stresses of raising a family ravaged my frame and brain. Work, the failing health of parents, and the terrifying onslaught of teenagerhood, and the continued existence as a couch watermelon, each took their toll. Although I look quite normal for a man of my age, I believe my own personal body image is perceived to be somewhat Gollumeseque.
This image is only reinforcing by my lack of sleep lately. Again, being a sensitive and sympathetic man, I am now bearing the hardship of menopause.
If my Beloved cannot sleep I will not sleep. The TV is given a 30 minute timer to lull her to sleep which usually occurs within 3 minutes. I spend the entire next 27 minutes tossing and turning trying to block out the light and noise. I am too exhausted to jump up and locate the remote which has mysteriously vanished anyway. Should gentle slumber finally come my way, it is interrupted by the whooshing of bedding being hurled off my hot flashing bed partner. This is always accompanied by a loud nocturnal sigh. When the hot flash has disappeared and a chill set in she will take the bedding and wrap her self up in a cocoon. She emerges the next morning like a beautiful butterfly (please allow me the artistic freedom to use “butterfly” as calling “my partner for life” a moth does not portray as positive an image) Meanwhile, whether it is a hot flash or a chill I end up without covers. Most of my energy that should go to repairing my body at the cellular level has been expended in delivering me from hypothermia.

I know that today’s post seems bleak. I sound like a salmon that has spawned and has drifted to a shallow gravel bed with one eye to the sky. Did my wedding vows actually say “unto my death do us part”? Am I just an old air mattress with one too many repairs sitting crumpled in the bottom of a storage tub? Am I an old magazine that has sat by the toilet for enough years that every portion of text has been read a dozen times and is on the verge of incineration?
NO! There is still a spark of life. The winds of change are making that tiny ember glow ever more brightly. There is hope. I have a new boat!!