How is your life different than you imagined?

Life seemed normal until I was about ten or twelve. It was then that I sensed dad had problems. He was often gone “for treatment.” Mother didn’t say why. But I soon understood he was addicted to morphine and other opiates. He smoked and drank to excess as well and died when he was forty-seven. I was nineteen. His death had a profound effect., liberating me from the torture of his living, which was actually a slow death for the last five or six years of his life—my critical teenage years. And it left me believing I would die at forty-seven. It’s irrational, but I believed it. My 47th birthday was in 1984. I’d think about the year 2000 and imagine what it might be like to see the turn of the century when I’d be sixty-three. It never occurred to me that I’d live that long.

So, here I am, an octogenarian. I recently read that “life’s greatest surprise” is to realize you are old. It’s true. I believe it’s no accident. Daddy’s death was the result of his worse than bad health habits: drugs, cigarettes, and booze. His dying planted in me a devotion to good health habits: I’ve never smoked a cigarette, not one; aside from a few youthful alcohol-stoked debauches, I’ve never drank to excess; and I’ve controlled my weight. I exercise regularly, and so on.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I’ve taken advantage of the best medical science I could find. My education has been a powerful tool. For example, since the late 1980s, I’ve been taking statin drugs to control my cholesterol. I can’t prove it, but I’d wager I’ve been taking statins longer than any other person on the planet. And I tracked my blood pressure and began taking medicine to control it when it reached a certain level. Too, I’ve gradually modified my diet to a more healthy one. That was the hardest task of all, but with time food preferences changed. I watched my skin for melanoma. That vigilance paid off when I was alerted by my barber of a brown lesion in the hairline of my neck. I gave her my phone and told her to take a photo of it. One look and I knew it was a melanoma. Fortunately, we caught it early, before it invaded and now it’s gone forever. All of these little things add up. I endured five prostate biopsies (a total of 100 needle jabs/specimens) over 10-12 years before we found it. And it, too, had been successfully treated.  

In the end, I was an entrepreneur. The creative urge and the freedom to be my own boss is the longue dureé of my life. It guided me in ways I couldn’t anticipate and came to understand only in retrospect.