As I said, aging is not for the timid.  From my perspective, it is best to avoid it if possible.  For most of my life, I've managed not to grow up, and it has helped, but in the last 10 years I've had a couple of hospital visits that were unplanned, unwanted, and more than a bit on the scary side.

As many of you may know, I had a gastric bypass around 9 years ago.  The fact that the results of that were not all I had hoped were not a fault of the procedure nor of the surgeon - if anything, the surgeon was so good that many of the short-term negative reinforcement episodes that usually accompany this surgery were not to appear to me, and I got sloppy  and didn't follow all the rules - and reaped the reward.

Now, I have never felt myself to be particularly stressed.  I know what I do, being on 24 hour call, can produce stress, but I was pretty convinced that I had found my way past all that, and was living a pretty stress-free life, and didn't have to worry about any negative effects the stresses I was ignoring were creating for me.

Well about two years after the bypass I took a motorcycle trip to Hatboro, where I had lived during some pretty important years of my life.  I do this on occasion, so it was not particularly unusual for me to take this trip.  What was unusual was that I got hit by a pickup truck in a parking lot and was knocked over, motorcycle and all.  I knew it hurt, because I had a rather leg caught between the motorcycle and the truck bumper, and I had a scrape or seven in various places. I looked at myself in the bathroom - nothing was broken or bleeding (or if bleeding only a little) and since I was closer to Hatboro, I decided to continue the trip there and hole up in a motel until the next day to see if rest made the pain go away.

The pain did not go away the next day and my left leg had assumed the color of an eggplant, so I decided to make one visit and then head for home instead of staying until Sunday or Monday and wandering around bucks and Montgomery county as I had planned.  Riding didn't hurt, but getting off when I got home surely did, and when my lovely wife saw my leg she was not pleased.  Eventually I had it seen, nothing was broken, and slowly it healed and assumed its normal coloring.  Then I got some sort of respiratory thing, had a chest X-ray and was told to get a CT scan, because the X-ray showed something like maybe an aneurysm....  the day I had the scan, my mother died.  Two weeks later, I was hospitalized for a GI bleed that took about 5 bags of blood before it stopped. Endoscopy showed ulcers - but I never knew they were there - no pain, no real discomfort (at least until I had lost so much blood I was falling down trying to walk to my chair) nothing like any warning.  The doctors said that I must be under a lost of stress.  Years later, reflecting on the happenings of that few weeks, I guess they were right, but at the time I didn't think so.

Then about 6 weeks ago, I dropped the motorcycle on my right leg (usually it is the left that I fall on....) and was in the presence of friends and fellow riders, so getting up was not hard.  We had stopped for ice cream, and as I made my way to get some, I noticed that that foot really hurt - but I got my ice cream and rode home accompanied by some friends who would not let me ride alone.  I didn't think it was all that bad, it just hurt.  A couple of days later I had it X-rayed and found a nondisplaced fracture of the fibula. After 71 years, I broke a bone.  I went to see an orthopod, was told I had to stay home and wear a fracture boot.  Meanwhile I had a couple of important projects at work, so I arranged to work at home, and within a week I woke up with some pretty awful abdominal pain, ended up in the ER, and had emergency surgery to find the source of the free air in my abdomen, which turned out to be a little bitty ulcer that had perforated, right next to two big ones that had not. The surgeon was a bariatric surgeon, so he was able to do what needed done laporoscopically, which meant a far shorter recovery time than might have been possible. Still, although the surgery was less than the bypass, from which I was sent home with 47 hours of my arrival in the hospital, this one took four days before I was sent home, and I was a whole lot more beat-up feeling.  I was older, and less prepared, and it took its toll.  Upon reflection, I guess falling, having a broken leg, a new boss and some hot projects was more stress than I was used to, it aggravated the ulcers I didn't know I had, and ended up blowing through the wall of my duodenum.

I am told that the bleed a few years back or this perforation could have ended my life, and that had I not gone directly to the hospital, the damage from the perforation could have kept me there for weeks instead of just a few days.  Hard as it may be to believe, until now the phrase 'might have ended my life' has not registered - I thought it was just inconvenient that these things were happening.

If I seem to be a bit low key, you'll know why.