It's a “learn on the job” activity,
You probably noticed changes in your
physical activity, your knees creak, your back aches and your neck aches and you
stoop forward so that you have a problem keeping upright when you walk. This is
not unusual, but it requires some thought to right the situation. You have to
learn to walk again and you have to take on training seriously or as my
daughter often calls it you need more movement in your daily activity.
Mentally you start to forget things
particularly your short-term memory disappears and it's very irritating in the
beginning but later on you take it with a sense of humour because you know it
might come back afterwards but you start writing things down, so you don't
forget them. You put the dates in your diary, so you don't keep them only in
memory, that sort of thing.
Your visits to the health services, like
the doctor, the eye specialist and the dentist and fysio increase in frequency and you
have to adapt to new activities around these things.
The number of medicines and the number of
pills that you take increases to the point where you have to have a system to make
sure that you do them in the right order in the right frequency.
So, life changes in many ways when you get older, but you must adapt to survive. Leaving it and doing nothing will just make things worse.
So getting old has its challenges and its problems but keeping a positive attitude helps a great deal. Enjoying an hour in the sun in winter helps a great deal.
You no longer ski or cycle but you can walk, probably you
have to use sticks but that doesn't matter, you can still get around and you're
very fortunate because there's many people are not so lucky.
So as we say in Yorkshire “keep taking the
pills and stay happy”.
