At My Age, I Really Should Know Better….

In my early 60s and I pull a muscle in my back filling up sand buckets at work.

It was agony I can tell you. The only way I could avoid the pain was to lie still in bed and to pop painkillers like they were Smarties, Yet once I managed to get up, standing and walking about wasn’t quite so bad as trying to rest as I was instructed to do.

The week before "Her indoors" had told me off when I agreed to work a couple of night shifts to help out. At that time my back had just started to become rather painful and when that overtime caused me to eventually have to take a few days off due to the discomfort, all I got was the “I told you so” look!

So let me introduce myself. Male, in my sixties, hence the sexagenerian tag, with a body that is all too quickly (it seems) falling apart, trying to plough through life in the same sorry, carefree way I seem to have always done.

It wasn’t always that way, mind. I seem to have been lucky, managing to get through to this ripe old age without too many medical emergencies and being what I would consider to be in pretty reasonable shape. Over the last year or so however the old body has started something of a decline down a very slippery slope and the aches and pains are noticeably more achy and painful.

The thing is that I don’t particularly feel much different to how I did 30, or even 40 years ago. The body is still willing and, in my mind, is still capable of everything it ever did before. It seems rather strange when you start to struggle walking up a hill, or maybe start to feel the strain on your body when crouching down for longer than a minute. I can’t understand it, I'd say, I used to be able to do that, but not any more. Indeed I now often have a desire to have a nap in the afternoon! What’s going on here? You’re getting older my son, that's what!

It is considered you become more agreeable with age and are likely to be less inclined to get angry. Your hormones change causing, for example the hair on your head to get thinner, but conversely get thicker in your ears and nostrils. Apparently you become more of a morning person, waking earlier and feeling tired earlier in the evening. These may be true, but if I remember rightly I was generally pretty grouchy when I was younger anyway, my hair has been receding for years and I’ve always been more “with it” in the mornings.

But the longer you live, apparently the more gravity brings you down. The space between your vertebrae get closer together meaning you could be maybe an inch shorter than you were back in your heyday. So not only is the body falling apart, it seems it is getting shorter as well.

Shame my weight doesn’t get smaller at the same time!

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