This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

I didn’t catch Alfred’s error, was referring to the “…50’s” of that other thread. Guess we’re in the same boat after all

I'll be 50 in six and a half months. I was thinking today at work that I can't put off getting a new glasses prescription anymore. It's definitely going to be for varifocals. I was trying to read the text on a label and the usual trick of alternating between looking over the top of my glasses and holding the item at near arms length was no longer cutting it. On the other hand, I'm regaining the reasonably flat stomach.

aside from perpetually needing to lose the usual 20-40lbs the only future milestones im currently acknowledging are retirement and finishing the mortgage

perhaps im being slightly optimistic about what the next uh 23 years have in store tbf

Can we talk about foot problems?

― sarahell

Let’s hear it

― calstars

i fell in the garage during the time i was coming out. only boot i can wear is an unna boot.

i've always had some serious issues with my feet. used to walk like a duck, or anton lavey. "learning to walk like a woman", for me, was basically the same as "learning to walk".

anyway i got what i call "susan foreman ankle" and the doctors call "chronic ankle instability". i liked walking a lot when i was younger. helped clear my head, helped keep me in shape. now if i walk more than a mile or so my the outside of my left foot starts hurting like the dickens. i did three months of physical therapy but there's apparently permanent nerve damage.

i keep working myself up to scheduling myself for another physical therapist referral. my foot, for one, but my scoliosis has also been causing me a lot of trouble lately. i'm wondering if i'm getting herniated on the left side. it's mostly thoracic pain. doing a lot of tissue massage. it's like one of those things you'd see in a nora ephron comedy or something, you can hear a hitachi buzzing and i'm making these moans of pleasure and when you actually get to see me i'm fully clothed and using it on my back, like, you know, it was designed for. i mean, i'm asexual, what did you _think_ i was doing with it?

i really am looking forward to growing old, not just because dying of natural causes is considered "winning" in my demographic, but because god i am _really_ going to enjoy making other people uncomfortable by talking about my medical history in detail.

I like to walk too and my ailment is a vague discomfort at the joint that connects the big toe to the foot upon flexing

From 19-20 I had a constant sinus infection and the college health center's solution was to sell me 500 count bottles of pseudoephedrine for $8, I was taking 15-20 a day and I can't be sure there was a direct correlation but eventually I had my first gout attack. Fucked me up good several times a year for over a decade no matter what I ate/drank or weighed. Finally discovered Febucip (allopurinol didn't work) and started buying it from a pharmacy in India. Haven't had a twinge in seven or eight years even as I've cut down to 40mg every other day (and sometimes every third day).

From 19-20 I had a constant sinus infection and the college health center's solution was to sell me 500 count bottles of pseudoephedrine for $8

― papal hotwife (milo z)

god those were the days, did they give you a pamphlet on how to make meth with it too? :)

Shit I didn't need to cook, that regimen already had me weighing less than I did as a six-inches-shorter high school freshman.

that is a LOT of pseudo per day dang dude

i can’t take more than 1 or i feel completely untethered lol #baby

that is a shocking amount of pseudoephedrine to take every day.

i used to take the equivalent of about eight a day and i felt unhinged all the time, tho my grades weren’t terrible

Wait like pure pseudoephedrine or just sudafed? $8 for that much is a really good deal!

Generic sudafed. It was an amazing deal and I dearly wish tweakers hadn't ruined everything - I take two almost every day because of allergies, having to go to the pharmacy and have my ID scanned to only buy 48 at a time is a PITA.

Bald spot for days

finally had my eye test after months of specsavers reminders. Standard degradation of the eyes and new glasses soon.

ending my 40's in two days.

I'm out of here in a couple of weeks.. on to lurking in the 50s thread.

Began my fifties last week. Good lord, does that sound weird.

Tiktok brought out Hum on 120 Minutes playing "Stars" from 1995, and I was all Here we go, the algorithm's finally giving me something besides tornado videos.

How can a man in his fifties be interested in seeing Hum playing "Stars" on tiktok. Must be a mistake made somewhere.

Haha
better Hum than Olivia Rodrigo though amirite

I keep thinking about the age descriptive “pushing 50” as a term that could be used to describe me and vomits

I thinks there's at least a 6 month grace period where you can hang around PP.

Had to look up who Olivia Rodrigo was because I'M FIFTY, CALSTARS.

Finally being prescribed a beta blocker after they heard my heart pounding out of my chest at docs

My resting heart rate has been awful my entire life

Been hoping for this for a long time

<3

welcome

I've always used a set of clippers with the cage off to shave my head but I was sold on getting a skullshaver by an evangelical baldhead in Cornwall so got one for Christmas. The thing is easy to set up, doesn't make a hair of mess and takes about 5 minutes to enbald an average human head, but, well, I've been bald for the best part of 15 years but damn now I'm *really* bald.

nb not an advertisement, just felt the need to share.

sounds like a Viking weapon

I do feel a bit flayed.

i found myself in an impromptu nye countdown last night, where we kind of put our hands in the center and slowly went "whooooooooooaaaaaaa!" as we raised our arms together and got louder and louder. right at 0:00:00 we all went "woo!" and i involuntarily farted at that exact moment, right as 2024 started. "god, i'm 40" i said, and the one other person there around my age said "heard that"

Definitely going to need varifocals but if I procrastinate for a few months that'll be a problem for me in my 50s.

Eyesight def one thing that has gotten worse in the last 5 years

I’m resisting glasses though, i can still see fine 99 pct of the time. Bar menus without good lighting an exception

new varifocals dont even have a line tbf the lens radiates out as required

A colleague at work has been wearing them for years and I didn't know.

Getting progressive lens glasses and bifocal contacts was a massive life improvement for me

"inevitable" ouch.

Finally being prescribed a beta blocker after they heard my heart pounding out of my chest at docs

yep, these are my people

xp "inevitable" because the 20s and 30s threads were created a couple of days before.

I’ve recently had to change the default display setting on my iphone to zoomed. Struggling to make out small text. Officially old

I'm turning 40 in June and this is me--ditto for browsers, though it's more for comfort than strict necessity. (Even though I already have a glasses prescription so strong that my partner winced when she tried them on.) I've switched my PlayStation 5 to my gaming computer monitor, rather than the TV, since I feel like I miss out on too many small details while sitting across the room on the couch.

I used to be a night owl but my bed time is now 11 p.m.--sometimes even 10:30 on a tiring day. I don't have much interest in late nights at the bar anymore but that still felt like a small symbolic surrender. I do miss midnight movies, though, since there are so many good ones in Chicago. When is some theater going to do capitalize on folks like us with a weekend "midnight at noon" series?

Every time I get some new passing ache or fatigue, there's a bit of me going, "oh god, is this some new permanent change I'm going to have to live with from now on?"

I haven't had any aches or pains or anything like that yet. The fucking eyesight thing is literally the only thing that reminds me of how old I am. Will prob need reading glasses next year but I'll take that. Could be a lot worse.

Last night my husband had to get a knot he described as “enormous “ out of my right hip— it had been giving me grief for days, I thought I had a slipped disc or something. It took him 20 minutes and a lot of me moaning and screaming to get it to a good place.

Then we had sex, though, so I guess I am still 39 lmfao.

health update

i put off seeing my eye doctor a little too long. i was driving home from a movie at 11 at night and drove straight onto a meridian. kind of a wake-up call. not only am i the same terrible driver i've always been (one of the effects of my diplopia means that i have basically no peripheral vision, plus there's the ADHD), i've basically completely lost any night vision i had. so i'm taking a break from driving for a while. i work from home and live close to transit so i figure i can swing it. it takes longer to get places so i get out less but i can still get to places when i need to. i'm seeing my eye doctor today - i can't just see any eye doctor. there's only certain eye doctors who will treat diplopia. i have to have special glasses made too, i can't just order from warby parker or whatever. it's fine, i have good vision insurance, and it just makes me think of some artisan grinding glass in a workshop somewhere. which probably isn't how it actually happens.

i tried starting physical therapy three months ago and then stopped going because of the holidays, the ice storm, clinical depression, etc. wound up going back yesterday, my physical therapist showed me some great exercises i could do on the days i'm too depressed to get out of bed. the ankle instability did cause me some issues in december... i fell while climbing the stairs and i banged up my left leg really badly. i've mostly recovered from that. i also bought an ankle support for when i need to walk. it doesn't do a lot, but it does something.

on top of the kyphosis i've started developing scoliosis on my left side over the past couple of years. it's really been bothering me and that's mainly what i've been focusing on. honestly i think the scoliosis does bother me more than the hunchback thing. i kind of like being able to tell people i'm a hunchback. then they argue with me (which is a weird thing to do but also a _normal_ weird thing? if you know what i'm saying?) and i get all salty, like, what, because i don't look like quasimoto? then i go off on this whole rant about kyphophobia in the media. it's one of those weird things, saying stuff like that is a good way of blowing off steam from constantly feeling pressured to talk about transphobia.

anyway my physical therapist told me about something called the schroth method which is apparently really effective on scoliosis. i said i'd look into it later because, you know, she's giving me exercises i can do when i'm too depressed to get out of bed at this point.

one thing i've definitely noticed is that i get a lot of bruises and don't know where or how i got them. right now i got this _huge_ bruise on the left side of my right leg and no idea how i got it. i do think a lot of it is the duloxetine i'm taking - i think that's made me bleed a lot easier. and maybe some of it estrogen making me more thin-skinned as well, but it's gotten more prominent in the last year or so, so i think some of it is age.

the main thing that's bumming me out is that i've crossed the point where i can say i'm in my "mid-40s" and gone over to having to say that i'm in my "late 40s". for some reason that's hit me particularly hard. i'm turning 48 in a couple months. i don't know why i feel old all of a sudden but i do. the new batch of people transitioning... even the ones transitioning later in life, pretty much all of them are younger than me. i do feel like a senior citizen, and it's not a good feeling.

x-p foreplay is foreplay, i guess.

Last night my husband had to get a knot he described as “enormous “ out of my right hip— it had been giving me grief for days, I thought I had a slipped disc or something. It took him 20 minutes and a lot of me moaning and screaming to get it to a good place.

Then we had sex, though, so I guess I am still 39 lmfao.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

meanwhile here i am at 47 and getting a knot massaged out of my hip sounds way better to me than sex lol. it's not a joke - well, i mean it is a joke, but it's also true - i got a back massager and i literally just use it on my back, because that's where it feels good. also though i am asexual, which probably has something to do with it.

Every time I get some new passing ache or fatigue, there's a bit of me going, "oh god, is this some new permanent change I'm going to have to live with from now on?"

― blatherskite, Thursday, 1 February 2024 18:25 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this kind of thing, yes

i missed a couple of games of footy before christmas, my only exercise that ive ever persistently been able to keep up over the years, and after a month of missing it every week i started to ask myself "have i played my last game of football?" which is not a stage I was ready for just yet tbh

tabes theres a "rubbing it in" joke there somewhere

moshed last night and sat down to catch my breath and the security guy (a 20-something) came up to me to ask if I was ok and I said "yes, just old"

what a nice young man he was tho

yeah he's cool, we know each other so I knew he'd find that amusing

this kind of thing, yes

i missed a couple of games of footy before christmas, my only exercise that ive ever persistently been able to keep up over the years, and after a month of missing it every week i started to ask myself "have i played my last game of football?" which is not a stage I was ready for just yet tbh

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Friday, February 2, 2024 4:24 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm 51 so I encourage you to keep going, but I made the decision last year to walk away from ultimate frisbee after 18 years, so I get it.

things fell into place as it happens, i got a game (possibly two) a week with the right level of players ten mins up the road in mid january

put me in coach i got one last decade in me

I played every week, all through my 30s but gave up due to fucked knees on pretty much my 40th birthday. I miss it terribly. Hang in there!