This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

3 years into the 50s.
3 years of unemployment.
no complaints as not having to worry re job/commute/office chaos in last 12 months have been an absolute blessing.
that and having mk2 (17 yrs, nearly 18) at home all this time has meant we have had a very different last era of my parenting groove than normal.

Hi!

could you repeat that Ned? my tinnitus is acting up

I said NICE WEATHER WE'RE HAVING

Aw, seeing Bimble and Morbs in this thread :(

One thing about being in my 50s is the accumulating weight of all the people I miss who are no longer here. I am aware that this becomes more and more of a thing, the presence of absence. I don’t like it.

Hello to the same decade as me, Ned.

For all of one week.

i have cancer now, as of last thursday. nobody knows but my partner and one friend and uh, now the internet. just don't let my 90 y/o mom find out, srsly. i'm good.

(i keep thinking of teh room when the mom says "it's official-- i definitely have breast cancer"

tbf, i don't have breast cancer.

So sorry to hear that. Hopefully there will be good treatment.

ty. this one is not so bad usually. 🤷🏻‍♂️

good luck Hunt3r

All the best. I'm sure it's a super stressful thing, but glad it's a not-so-bad one.

Indeed, hoping all turns out well!

All the best of luck, Hunter, I hope you'll get good treatment and get through this <3

oh hunt3r! good luck with your treatment - hope you're through it all as quickly as possible and hope you're not laid up for too long in the meantime!

srsly i don't know why i would ever do blurt that, but i do appreciate very very much.

*considers personal history*

i think i'm destined to crash out, ridiculously. doing something else. it think i've got plenty of time. it'll never get me.

*envisions cancer-tombstone (carved in old.css: Original ILX2 Live Stylesheet)*

"damn. it got me. :-("

Did my warranty just expire? I pulled a muscle in my chest, which makes coughing XTREEMLY painful. And last week my dentist put a temporary filling in one of my molars; she can't do a permanent filling until I get my wisdom teeth extracted. The first available consultation date won't be until the end of this month.

*jaw starts hurting again LAMF*

40th High School Reunion coming up next month. Pinch me.

Yikes. That’s me next year.

This is my 40th h.s. year too, but I haven't been to any reunions since the 10th. Hate those things.

I went to the 50th for my middle school four years ago. At least one strange experience too inside-baseball to detail here.

I don’t per se hate reunions but like WmC only ever attended my 10th. 33rd is this year.

Something is compelling me to go. Pandemic? My own kids in HS? In any case, recently waded into our designed friendbook page. One guy had a picture of himself with Scott Miller, because he was in a band with Miller’s wife at the time!

I just turned 50. Feel about the same as I did last week.

The only reunion I went to was the 20th. 30th didn't happen, either because of apathy or COVID. (I graduated in 1989, but I think no one got anything started in 2019; there was some talk about doing a range of adjacent classes. Then the world stopped.)

Because I already talk to my actual HS friends with some frequency, there's not a lot of urgency to meet up with the people who hated me (or vice versa)

I'm now older than Roy Orbison ever got to be.

Schoolfriends... I guess I'm in vague social media contact with one or two, but none who stayed in my hometown. Never went to a reunion, never even heard about one, though I suppose Xmas Eve at the Hotel Vic in New Brighton in '90s was almost that :) Still pals with a couple of undergrad-era ppl. But it's mostly another world.

I don’t mind HS people, am always happy to run into them, but was never that friendly with them to begin with, had a long commute so didn’t hang out too much after school, except on the subway! Also my high school was huge, so much so that I only know a fraction of the people who were in my class, even forgetting about someone in my neighborhood who went. Actually know a lot more people from my rival high school and socialize with them regularly. College is yet another story. I didn’t remain friends with most of the people I knew when I was actually in college, although I did start hanging out with and talking to my old roommate in recent years. But, due to one or two other friends, especially one I knew before college, I know lots of other people who were there at the same time that I hadn’t known.

This went a lot better than expected

I think the 7, 8, 9 years of a decade can hang heavy as you consciously or unconsciously prepare to move into another decade. I turn 57 in 2 months time - and this has felt the fastest decade so far.

A new set of concerns looking ahead: what's life going to be like when I stop working, how ready am i to live on a smaller income, can i afford to stay in London, where could I move to, what will I actually do to fill the time? Not coming up with any firm answers, and it seems to me impossible to know how the future me will feel. But one thing I've learnt so far is that comparing my situation with other people isn't a good idea. One of my friends of a similar age has just inherited, and is about to sell, a £1.5m house. Some comparisons will just make you unhappy if you dwell on them.

Get your shingles vaccine everybody!

Thanks. Was just discussing that the othe day whilst discussing the Merrychef oven. #OneThread

I had chicken pox pretty bad in my mid Twenties, so I'll need to get this.

Friend had postherpetic neuralgia and told me “don’t even consider fucking around with this, get the shingrix as fast as you can.” So I signed up and waited like 8 months, but yup.

Got mine almost immediately after I turned 50

You don't invited to have the shingles vaccine until you are in your 70s in the UK.

*get

I had shingles at 48. Not sure if had postherpetic neuralgia - but I couldn't sit back fully in a chair for ages afterwards without unpleasant irritation (I wouldn't call it pain though.

If you've already had shingles will the vaccine do anything for you? I had it all up and down my right arm and in a few spots on my back a couple of years ago.

(I turned 50 just about two weeks ago.)

shingles can recur and even become chronic, so I'd go with the vaccine ... I got it a couple of months ago along with flu and TDAP vaccines and didn't notice much of a reaction besides a sore arm

Yeah definitely get the vaccine. My mom had a case of it some years back and she was vehement about its awfulness. As soon as I turned 50 in March I arranged to get my shots.

(Other thing I did was get a colonoscopy, which you should also do assuming coverage is there. In my case they combined it with an endoscopy due to a bit of GERD issues, and I'm glad for that.)

The strange world of the UK's NHS:

You're eligible for the shingles vaccine when you're aged 70 to 79. The shingles vaccine is not available on the NHS to anyone aged 80 and over because it seems to be less effective in this age group.

apparently i am now older than Frasier's dad (John Mahoney was 53 during the first season)

I've heard that Paul Rudd is currently older than Wilford Brimley was when he was in Cocoon

The British equivalent is Victor Meldrew, Richard Wilson was also 53 when it started.

I don't OW!

i'll tell you what are nice: werther's originals

Oh hai, this is me I guess. Someone told me I don't look 50, but did I look 49 a couple of weeks ago?

One thing about being in my 50s: some days a knee or a foot or an ankle will just decide it isn't going to be cooperating. Minor inexplicable aches and pains will arrive and leave, with no precipitating event and no explanation.

Okay, I can mostly live with that. But what's novel and interesting to me is that I have become a connoisseur of pain, and can detect differences between types of it. Like, I get at least three distinct kinds of discomfort, and their particular flavors are as distinct as wine varieties.

Lyme arthritis: exquisitely sharp pain in the bursa of the left knee accompanied by a high fever. Lasts three days and then vanishes, mysteriously, for a decade.

Gout: excruciating pain in the right big toe, comes and goes on its own schedule. Supposedly caused by beer and beef and seafood, but even if I avoid those entirely for years at a time, the pain still comes and goes on its own schedule.

Garden-variety arthritis: just shows up from time to time, no logic to it. Every now and then, just for fun, there's an actual injury, a hernia, or a sprain.

My diet and lifestyle and exercise habits are decently healthy. I have weeks, months, and years of nothing going seriously wrong. Then I get a week or two where Advil is basically a condiment.

Whoops I forgot one more flavor: cervical radiculopathy, where a pinched nerve made one of my hands decide not to work for a week. Departed as quickly as it arrived. Never recurred.

Latest physical grumble (I have blessedly few, knock wood) is what seems like it may be creeping carpal tunnel in my left hand. I attribute this not to all the typing I do but to holding my damn phone all the time, which I am seeking alternatives to. It's starting to turn into a bit of a tiny chronic pain, which I dread — things that are going to start hurting and will just continue to hurt from now until cremation.

things that are going to start hurting and will just continue to hurt from now until cremation

This is, indeed, the downward slope. Welcome.

Not to be all Doctor Internet, tipsy, but: I was 99% sure I had carpal tunnel, but it turned out to be a pinched nerve in my neck (C5) showing up as pain in the wrist. Confirmed by nerve conductivity testing. Bodies are weird.