Googling Constipation, Kvetches, TAVR, Social Worker, Being Jewish

Stanford Hospital

 90 and still pissin' into the wind.  'Thinking The Impossible'..

You become, when you're in your eighties, a borderline hypochondriac. Growing old was downright pleasant compared with being old. Being old ain't for sissies or wimps. One of the best things of old age however, to paraphrase Dean Martin, is that you know that when you get out of bed in the morning that you're feeling as bad as you’re going to feel all day.

When you're old you think that every kvetch could be life threatening. Google became a big pain in the ass because it allowed me to constantly check on my fucking kvetches. I have Googled everything from constipation to aortic valve stenosis.

Bowl movements at 90 can be difficult. Straining to have a bowl movement became a way of life so I Googled 'constipation' and up popped stuff suggesting prunes, prunes, more fiber and more prunes. So I start every day with a boring fucking breakfast of a fresh fruit smoothie and three cups of coffee topped off with six nausea threatening prunes. Fiber is now part of a way of life for me. Plus, thanks to Google I no longer think that I'm going to get cancer because I can't take a shit.

At age 87 I cycled some 4,500 miles on an Eddy Merckx road bike thinking that I looked cool doing it. Yeah, everybody who knew me or of me thought that I was a fucking maniacal freak and maybe I was.

At 88, two really bad bike crashes put me in ICU twice. Macho me had to go out, the second time, not feeling good, with apparently a driving need to prove to the world that I really was a dumb schmuck. (Since 'schmuck' is Yiddish for penis it is impossible, by definition, to be a smart schmuck).

My first crash resulted in a 'visit' to the Stanford Hospital which is loaded with fucking 30 year old, know it all doctors. They introduced me to 'aortic valve stenosis'. What I thought was my 'heart murmur' for 30 years, was really 'aortic valve stenosis' and death was hovering over me, just around the corner. 

I needed to get an aortic valve replacement RIGHT NOW...As soon as possible. A TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement) procedure was a right away, must do.

'Minimally invasive procedure' were the buzzwords of the geniuses. Realizing that God created cardiologists, orthopods and urologists to perform procedures and knowing that a 'minor operation' is an operation that someone else has, I was as nervous about the whole thing as a Rabbi in a stone quiet Buddhist temple.

Minimally invasive? What a fucking joke. At 88, minimally invasive translates to death defying. The various pre-procedure tests for the TAVR were mind boggling. Shoving a catheter in your groin to run color dyes through your veins ain't like spending a day at the beach. You have to spend 3 hours post procedure in the hospital to be sure you are really okay. No problem for the doctors, big problem for me. I could see myself needing three weeks to a month to recover from that fucking minimally invasive pre-procedure, procedure assuming that I was still alive.

An angiogram, another necessary pre-TAVR procedure, is a pushover for younger folks. Not so much for an old dog like me. But the TAVR itself takes the 'risk free' cake.

This is where they replace the aortic valve by running a catheter from your groin into your heart with a balloon containing the new valve. The balloon goes into your heart and somehow the new valve is installed. Putting a new clutch in a stick shift car sounds more appealing and less dangerous. And then you're 'out of commission' for 4 weeks at least, after this so called 'minimally invasive' procedure. A phrase I grew to hate and still do. What bullshit.

The pay off came when I had to go see a social worker to discuss what happens to my body and my assets, such as they are, in the event that I kicked off while being 'minimally invaded'.

This wannabe shrink was pompous and loaded with 'what ifs'. She took me out of worrying about bowl movements, incontinence, fitful sleeping and just being old, to thinking only of death. Just like the old days. I might just as well have been living again with the Princess.

No way was a return visit to the social worker with documentation on my agenda.

If I want to feel like shit, I can do it all by myself. I don't need any help from a social worker or anyone else for that matter. When you're Jewish and guilty, feeling like shit comes naturally.

With Jews 'Something is terribly wrong if everything was alright'...Yossarian, Catch 22