Limpin' 'Bout My G-G-Generation

Just got back the X-rays from Friday’s doctor appointment, and the diagnosis is arthritis in my so-excruciatingly-painful-for-the-past-month-it-had-me-limping right knee. Or, as he rather sensationally put it, “We found a good deal of degenerative joint disease.” When I asked for English, please, he said arthritis. So? I asked. Possible knee replacement, he said. I said WTF! And he backed off, oh not for years probly, lotsa stuff we can do in the meantime as long as you can stand the pain. Uh-HUH. I’ll be talking to my regular doctor about it next week, and we’ll just see about that.

"Joint disease," forsooth! Joints had nothing to do with this...though I wouldn't say no to one right about now, maybe, even...

But still. It kinda shoots all to hell my theory of my skeletal system being kryptonite-indestructible ’cause of all the damn milk I’ve drunk since childhood. (I have theories on blood circulation and electricity, too, that may now have to be rethought.)

(Briefly, Patricia’s theory of blood circulation is that blood DOESN’T circulate, William Harvey to the contrary notwithstanding. You have finger blood, arm blood, toe blood. When you have a blood test and the doctor can’t get more blood out of your poor needlestuck finger? That’s because there’s no more blood in the area, and you have to wait till it fills up again, like a well.
And electricity: the little electrons runrunrun along the wires goingohsofast and then they hit the lightbulb and explode, and that makes the light. Then their little dead electron corpses float to the floor and those make the dustbunnies.)
(I tell ya, I’m closing in on that Nobel…)

Not to mention the fact that just about everybody in my family on both sides has been afflicted with osteoarthritis sooner or later and it was always a question of When, not If, it would get around to me.

Not to mention the further fact that I am, after all, 60 years old, hard though I find it to believe, and hence a Dowager Boomer.

I say again, but still. Boomers are meant to live forever. We are meant to remain 25 years old physically, if not perhaps mentally. Though maybe that too. Arthritis is something, dare I say it, OLD people get.

We’re not old, we boomers. We hoped we’d DIE before we got old, remember? And though lots of us did, here the first of us—me, Cher, Goldie Hawn, Bill Clinton, yes, even Oliver fucking Stone—are all crashing through the 6-0 Barrier this year. Weird, I tell ya, weird!
But as long as Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger are still older than us, and they always will be, I’m not worried.

And even if I have to hobble around on my Irish blackthorn walking stick from here on in (though what I REALLY want is a sword-cane, or even a sword-brolly like John Steed), I am NOT old. I am just…cumulatively yearful.