Appointment With Destiney

I don't like going to the doctor. I tend to equate the experience with bad news. Both of my parents went to doctors shortly before they died. Coincidence? I think not.

Or maybe I should stick with the wisdom espoused by the late Warren Zevon who, shortly before he became the late Warren Zevon, suggested that perhaps a few more regular trips to the doctor might have kept him from experiencing the cancers quite as completely as he ended up doing. 

Or perhaps I should stop looking for chicken and egg correlations in this matter and see the occasional doctor's office visit as a mildly affirming or corrective. This past week I made one of my less-than-frequent stops to our family doctor. I had not been to see her since COVID began. And my mom died. And all sorts of other life changes. I was tensed for whatever might come my way. 

My wife has a much more regular and, if I may, healthy relationship with our doctor. They talk about me when they meet, I mean besides all the other potential subjects that could come up between them, specifically my wife's health. But I expect that I will be tattled on for one thing or another if I don't show up, so I got myself an appointment and headed on in.

The first non-surprise was my blood pressure. I have always skewed to the higher end of "healthy" and my initial reading was higher than that. High enough to inspire a suggestion: How about medication to bring those numbers down a bit? 

I take a few medications. And a handful of vitamins. One more pill? What's the difference? Well, the surrender to the certain age at which I find myself. The age in which I find that having high blood pressure could be more of a problem than when I was a  mere slip of a lad. When I was in my forties, I used to get a stern look and a reminder not to eat so many salty foods. The salty foods have already been diminished or eliminated, and now I was left with the option of giving up one more thing, or trying this one little pill. 

It felt a little like surrendering, but I asked my doctor on the way out if there was any good news. She told me she thought I was pretty healthy overall, and that I was doing a good job staying active and finding ways to stay that way. Suddenly the sting of that little pill diminished.

A bit. 

So now I'm sixty and taking medicine to get to seventy. Or eighty. Next year I will be in the running to outlive my father. I'll keep taking my medicine and stay away from small planes.