This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

At 58, I’m hoping that UFOs become IFOs before I go, along with getting another Paul Buchanan album and/or Prefab Sprout 18cd box set of unreleased projects. What hits nowadays, besides family and friends ailing, is the lost companionship of art from Mark Linkous, Johann Johannsson, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, etc.

I'll be 57 in a week and I think about mortality so differently as a parent -- most acutely because my older son is disabled. his younger brother will be fine and will make his way, but the thought of my eldest having to be without me is very hard for me; we are bonded, he and I, I've come to think of all the the experiences I had prior to parenthood as preparatory work for the hard, wonderful, great, life-defining work of being his Dad. I think about this so much. He'll only be a child a while longer and I expect I'll feel somewhat different after the last vestiges of physical childhood drop off from him -- but his disability means he will in many ways remain the child he is, just in a bigger body. gaming how to soften the eventual blow of his parents' absence from the world in thirty or so years occupies me for shorter or longer periods of contemplation almost daily. although I should also say, my family tends to live for what I used to call "an abominably long time," so I may have forty years left, who knows.

i got cancer a few yrs ago, prostate. often, if they catch it early enough, before it's likely to spread, the specialists do the "wait wait wait wait NOW!" routine. which was weird. and they think they got all of mine, it tests that way. but whenever i think about "how i'll likely go" that's def in there.

asking your oncologist "so what are my odds of metastatic recurrence" is weird. i'm told very low. and i have a relatively recent book with the numbers based on my track to where i am, which agree. so i mostly forget it and test once a year.

thanks for sharing that jclc, that's very moving. i struggle with priorities and that is inspiring, stay well.

And 23 years isn't that long! I remember 2001 pretty clearly.

I feel quite the opposite! If anything, I feel the guy walking around wearing my body and name in 2001 is long dead -- I obviously *know* a lot of things about that guy, what he did, and what he thought, but memory is too strong a word for the kind of awareness I have about those things. And in turn I expect I myself will be long gone before the physical body with my name stops walking around and talking to people and doing stuff. And that's OK!

Hunt3r I am in a similar situation (breast not prostate); I've ditched tamoxifen as secondary prevention because I just can't live the way it made me feel. If I have a recurrence it will be stage 4 and terminal, full stop. In hospice I was was with women who died that way (some in their 20s and 30s). It wasn't pretty. I already feel somewhat responsible for my own cancer because I drank plenty of alcohol, and now I wonder how I'll feel if I get terminal cancer when I could have done some preventative therapy :(

asking your oncologist "so what are my odds of metastatic recurrence" is weird.

Asked my oncologist What were the odds that I was going to get colon cancer again.

He replied, I can tell you with some certainty that you won't be getting this cancer again.

And then we just did this for a few more minutes:

https://i.imgur.com/oIYib5k.gif

any y'all ever just pooped in a box and thrown it into the post?

weird times we live in.

yes I have!

I hope that 3 years from now I will be able to do that instead of the whole procedure

When I told the nurse I forgot to remove my wedding ring, she just said "well, it's not a sterile procedure you know." *shudders*

thx pplains and quincie. we're def not alone.

any y'all ever just pooped in a box and thrown it into the post?

the small joys of life really should not be denied

any y'all ever just pooped in a box and thrown it into the post?

I got something like a little thumb drive in a biohazard bag

My cat poops in a box

i've received a box but have been putting off pooping in it

ha i thought you were gonna say “i received a box but have been afraid it has poop in it.”

It has been 23 years, hasn't it? You all have grown and progressed, but I'm pretty much stuck in the same situation as I was all of those years ago.

idk about that, you just released an EP on Bandcamp that is really cool! like I have no idea what kind of gear you used to make that, it sounds pleasingly idiosyncratic to my ears. I don't think that would have happened 23 years ago?

how have my feet become so ugly?

I was once walking along the Regent's Canal, behind St Pancras Old Church, when I saw a dazzling white box being nudged against the bank by the wash from a passing boat. I was so taken by it - the immaculate design, the incongruity - that I fished it out. There was no messaging, no card slipped under the ribbon, so I untied the beautifully formed knot, parted the interlaced cardboard opening and there, nestled in tissue paper, was a perfectly formed human turd.

Not to detract from Nick's unsightly trotters, like.

put the turd into the box
put the box into the mail
mail the turd into the wurrrrrld
until til you get cured

so not clever so in my head

Hah! When I turn 50 I told people that realistically speaking, I had crossed over into the Mortality Zone.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

i feel like cheating when i check into this thread - i don't even turn 48 for another month - but mortality feels are real. sometime last year i realized that i was now in my late 40s. i'm working on not calling myself "old", just "middle aged". it's hard, though. most of the people i know now are younger than me. i spend a lot of time in medical settings with people much older than me... it feels like being a mainline protestant. taking care of my health doesn't feel like a full-time job, but it does feel like a part-time job. i'm not british but my doctor did give me a box to poop in and i've been putting it off, just like i've been putting off my DEXA scans. i take more prescription meds than most ILXors. some people my age aren't on any meds at _all_. that amazes me. i take... 17? 18? pills daily. the number changes a lot.

i was talking to a friend... she is in her 50s, and is retiring at the beginning of july... she's already survived cancer once. she was talking about a friend who says "i'm here for a good time, not a long time". trans people do have a much shorter average lifespan than cis people. not sure how much, just like i'm not sure how many of us there are. statistics about us are all sus. the only lifespan statistic i know... i'm past the average lifespan according to that statistic. probably a high standard deviation on that statistic, but still... it's not just about suicide. it's about allostatic load. the more stress a person is under the higher their risk for _all_ forms of mortality - heart attack, cancer, etc. trans people are under a lot of stress right now.

i don't know how i feel about death. it simultaneously feels very real and imminent and very distant. being trans isn't a terminal illness. i used to view _life_ as a terminal illness. i don't know. before transition i was into antinatalism, i used to wish i was never born. my girlfriend is really resentful about being born, is inclined towards antinatalism, but i'm not. i'm glad i was born, i'm glad to be alive, i'm glad that i'm not immortal, that i'm going to die at some point. in theory i'm here for a good time, that's how i've been trying to live for the past few years. i get in my own way a lot. i haven't had as much of a good time as i'd like to be having. i guess i am here for a long time, at least by trans standards.

my dad died at 78. he left my mom around age 50. i think he tried after that. genuinely did. at the same time i feel like he spent a long time waiting to die. my mom is 75. she's in a nursing home. her kids don't visit her because she behaves terribly towards, like, everyone. she doesn't treat other people with kindness and respect, particularly not her kids. i don't know how it is... like, because of who they are, because of their generation, they didn't really have the opportunity to be queer that i've had. they're both compulsory het, compulsory cis. is it being queer that increases mortality, or is it being out? maybe it's just being out.

i'm in a fair amount of constant pain now. i used to be really afraid of my body falling apart, my body declining, and now that it's happening i'm not. i love my body more than i ever did before. it feels a little like shutting the barn door after the horse left sometimes, but i do work hard to take care of my body, as much as i can. physical pain, some people say, doesn't feel categorically different from emotional pain, and i've found that to resonate with my experience. it doesn't _hurt_ as much as i thought it would. that's actually dangerous, though... i avoid paying attention to things. i assume things are just "in my head" when there's physical stuff going on that could be treated.

i wish i could retire like my friend is doing. work is hard. my job sucks. i was hoping to find somewhere stable to just coast until retirement, but i guess that's not in the cards. one of my friends... he's 48, he found out that he's getting laid off from the job he's been working for 17 years, probably next year. they want him to train his replacements. he's staying on out of spite. of course they want him to quit so they don't have to pay him severance. is anybody going to hire him at 50? i was hanging out with someone this week who got a new job four months ago after sending out 650 resumes. she's a programmer. it gets harder to keep going.

i've been at my current job for seven years, and i've had a 401k for the first time, and it's not going to get me very far. i didn't plan on living long enough to retire. the idea that i'd get too sick to work didn't occur to me. sometimes i think about disability. i am disabled. i shouldn't be working, probably. it's just such an arduous process, an arduous process to go through just to have people treat you like shit for the rest of your life. right now i deal with a lot of difficult shit but i have enough money, and that counts for something. i don't have to worry about where i'm going to live next year, like a lot of my friends do.

I feel quite the opposite! If anything, I feel the guy walking around wearing my body and name in 2001 is long dead -- I obviously *know* a lot of things about that guy, what he did, and what he thought, but memory is too strong a word for the kind of awareness I have about those things. And in turn I expect I myself will be long gone before the physical body with my name stops walking around and talking to people and doing stuff. And that's OK!

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

of course my experience is going to be different from most people's, but i do have a really odd feeling looking back at old pictures of me. that person _isn't_ me. that person is a stranger with my face, someone whose memories I have, but i've changed so much that i can't think of that person as me. i do think, eephus!, that it's kind of the same for most people. that we have this illusion that we're the same person for all of our lives, but in reality we're more like ships of theseus. we're blind to the changes in ourselves, sometimes. i saw the person i used to be in the mirror long after other people only saw kate when they looked at me.

It is an odd realization to have an idea of what the rest of your future looks like, having been alive and alert for the past 40+ years and seeing how that all went.

I don't think I'm ever going to see flying cars or flying scooters. Cancer's not going anywhere before, say, 2050. No one's going to go to Mars and come back before I'm gone.

I'm not disappointed! I'm also getting to the age where I'm not huge on surprises!

― pplains

i have had a lot more surprises in my life than i thought. i've seen and done things that i believed were literally impossible when i was younger. me when i turned _40_? me in april 2016? my god. i had no idea. no idea. flying cars, flying scooters, cures for cancer, people on mars... the surprises aren't the known unknowns, they're the unkown unknowns. this world is a very uncertain place for me. and it's easy to just look at the bad things, at impending catastrophe, at possible... extirpation. it's easy to look at all of the ways life has gotten worse, the world has gotten worse, capitalism is hell, the internet is hell, and yet, and yet, i'm happier than i've ever been in my life. i'm a more _emotionally healthy_ person than i've ever been in my life.

i'm afraid of the future, and i want to see as much of it as i can. i'm looking forward to death, and i've never been happier to be alive.

people used to say i have an "old soul". i wanted to be old, for a long time, i lived like i was old. lived like i thought old people lived. i don't live like that now.

I don't think I'm ever going to see flying cars

Seeing the way that people drive now, thank God for this!

some people my age aren't on any meds at _all_.

In his late 70s, my dad bragged that most men his age were on medication, and he didn't have to take any. It turns out that he should have been, he just had a lazy doctor.

a friend who says "i'm here for a good time, not a long time"

The Trooper ethos seems to have snuck over the US border from Vancouver.

This thread is making me think of the "[thing] you have to [experience] before you die" construction. I acknowledge the importance of being reminded of death, but no-one's going to carve into my gravestone "he heard the Ray Charles boxset". Which is to say if I were paying attention to cultural products at all, I'd be choosing them differently if I had a prognosis of six months or 40 years of further life.

also reading ahead a little here (turning 50 in august)… appreciate everyone’s reflections, really special threads these (age) threads i think

definitely feel like there is a change coming but not yet here or not quite - physically still feel pretty much the same as 40 except for my fuckin eyesight which has plunged off a cliff

think about death all the time but in a kind of chill way? like i think sometime in my 30s i took on some half-digested meditation factoid about it being healthy to spend time every day reflecting on the inevitability of your own end, and that kind of rippled through just about every aspect of my life - i think it helps me to be kinder to everyone and maybe access joy more readily - it is as close as i come to a whole philosophy of living, that we are only here for a finite time so we owe it to each other to help make that time as cool as possible - sorry for new ageing but i think that is my true self (also still a cunt oftentimes to be clear, but I consciously strive not to be)

frequently and increasingly in awe of nature, just a beautiful tree or a particular flavour of sunlight can send me spinning right out - swimming in the ocean also infinitely renewing, and when i have days where i get a good dose of nature i feel like i am living correctly and will have fewer regrets when i check out

also very tired! working harder than i ever have because i know i am a lot more fucked if i lose my job at 50 - and so is my wife and our kids are teenagers and and they are great but cumulatively raising kids is a heavy lift! and we are tired - and try to remember that this is probably our peak as a family, and curse work for getting in the way - while recognising our good fortune

i was talking to an acquaintance who is in his 60s yesterday, and he said all his mental health struggles just disappeared as soon as he retired - contemporary work conditions and the imperative to work fucks us right up hey - and i have a great job! But it is still fkn hard to endure

anyway love to all i guess

not a guess! that sounded way to equivocal! love to all!

think about death all the time but in a kind of chill way?

Yeah definitely this! Like, post-50, you've lived a full complement, you did the main things, or at least I feel like I did. Obviously the actuarial expectation would give me another couple of decades but if something happened to me tomorrow it wouldn't be like "omg too soon" or "life cruelly cut short," maybe more like "life cruelly cut but tbf decently long"

we are only here for a finite time so we owe it to each other to help make that time as cool as possible

fully feel this too, with emphasis on the fact that we owe it to each other, and others owe it to us, but no one owes it to themselves, this is a feature of the interpersonal part of our being

Lesson of this thread: 50s are emo

50s: all the feels

think about death all the time but in a kind of chill way?

That sounds great, but perhaps that it might be a bit abstract? The late 50s and beyond have a way of making your thinking more specific: more close family members, friends, and acquaintances drop off unexpectedly, sometimes in tragic circumstances, and your thoughts on death take a more concrete/specific shape. For example: how long will I still be able to get in and out of this shower/survive another hard winter with this COPD? You can start to see your future inevitably narrowing down.

great post emsworth. my mom told me about coming to a similar realisation. she was the sort of person who both needed to be and was right all the time, and she said it was huge to realise that kindness was actually the imperative rather than correctness. a hard gear to shift to sometimes

I have similar needs to your Mom, Tracer, and the most useful info my therapist told me was something similar regarding an interaction with my wife. "She just wants you to support her, not give her advice."

It doesn't help that the current trend is to encourage older women to be blunt and uncompromising. I don't want to waste the rest of my life telling younger people to respect their elders.

great post emsworth. my mom told me about coming to a similar realisation. she was the sort of person who both needed to be and was right all the time, and she said it was huge to realise that kindness was actually the imperative rather than correctness. a hard gear to shift to sometimes

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

god, i wish my mom could find it in herself to come to that realization. she's not a bad person. i love her and i learned a lot from her, not just facts but a lot of my values come from her. this idea she had... like in particular the sort of feminism she holds to is the idea that "women can do everything men can do", meaning that women _should_ try to do everything men do. i don't know if it's systemic misogyny or what but it hasn't worked out super well for her. she's really isolated. she doesn't seem to understand why her kids don't talk to her. if the current trend is to encourage older women to be blunt and uncompromising, my mom was really ahead of her time. she is _definitely_ not a people pleaser and never has been.

in my 30s i took on some half-digested meditation factoid about it being healthy to spend time every day reflecting on the inevitability of your own end, and that kind of rippled through just about every aspect of my life

I guess this is kind of a cliche at this point, but reading Montaigne on this in college was one of the key revelations of my life.

Let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight (Death). And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it.

To be obsessed with time, as I am, is to be obsessed with death. otm.

One of the commonest things I'm sure loads of us are on are statin drugs for cholesterol. Esp for me given im T2D and not as slim as I usedta be.

Anyways, of all the med merrygorounds Ive been on this year for diabetes, blood pressure etc, the one that violently disagreed with me was atorvastatin - it gave me aggresively elevated liver enzymes (like, I thought 80-100 was high but this was 300+) and made me feel like I had the flu all over.

So, I stopped it, but my cholesterol went back up a little as a result :( I dont know why, I dont really eat much bad/fatty food. Sigh.

So anyway this week I started a new "non statin" one and christ, within 2 days I am back to feeling like a truck ran me over. WTF does this stuff DO.

BTW I love that the medical terminology for the side effect is "liver derangement", like my liver has gone ham and is tearing about my body shreiking about the gubmint.

That sucks Trayce - my GP threw me on a statin after a triglyceride reading that made her eyes bug, and it sorted things out pretty thoroughly. I need to eat better but at least the medication crutch is giving me space to make some changes. I hope you get better meds or better news soon.

Yeah I dont know wether to just stop taking it - at least til next week, because its my birthday this week and a mates 40th on the weekend so I WILL be doing some drinking. Then maybe I'll try again.

I dread having to go the diet route because I dont know what more I can do short of completely avoiding any fats and eggs, which I'm dont want (eggs are my main protein source). My chol isnt even THAT high, theyre just doing that "you tick all the boxes for heart disease risk so take all the drugs" trip they all do.

My cholesterol was so sky high my GP told me I had a 15% chance of a stroke or heart attack in the next 5 years. Am now on a high dose of statins and cholesterol is back in the normal range - thankfully I don't have any side effects from the statins. There are various types of statins though so maybe try a different type? My doctor told me diet only gets you so far, you can only vary your cholesterol levels by 15% or so by diet alone...

High cholesterol runs in my mom's family, even though they're all generally pretty healthy people. (And my mom has been mostly vegetarian for 50 years and always skinny, but she's been on statins for years.) My own cholesterol has been dancing around the high end of normal for several years, I'm due for an annual exam in a few months and if it's gone up I won't be surprised if my dr. starts talking about medication. Which I'd prefer to avoid if possible, but I guess we'll see.

If you want to calculate your very own 10 year risk for heart attack or stroke, you can use this tool from the American Academy of Cardiology https://tools.acc.org/ascvd-risk-estimator-plus/#!/calculate/estimate/

You can also play around with the tool to see how much the risk changes if your blood pressure changes or cholesterol or you start taking a statin

Patient oriented info is here https://tools.acc.org/ascvd-risk-estimator/default.aspx#page_reference_patient

Jesus after two decades on ilx I am grappling with it becoming another venue for the organ recital

Which tbf I am completely part of!

The thing I didn't appreciate until reaching this bracket was that, to me anyway, bodies and their functions and malfunctions and dysfunctions are actually really interesting. Not that their failures and planned obsolescence aren't sad and grim, but they're also objectively fascinating to me. It's a new thing to live through, and it gives me greater appreciation for the relatively able body I still currently have. I've been exercising much more regularly the last few years, and I think a lot of that comes not from trying to defy age so much as enjoy what I can do while I can do it.

having spent decades considering the advisability of death, it seems churlish to now question its inevitability

otoh there is (which covid deniers etc never seem to recognize) a huge gap between being alive and living a decent life

possibly my dad was otm

spent much of the last 30+ hours with the left side of my mouth inexplicably throbbing with pain. (a lot of) advil was no help; the only thing that seemed to ease it was maintaining a mouth full of cool water

seems to have gone away (for now, at least). and on the bright side, i am extremely hydrated

i mean i'm glad it's probably not a chronic thing, but i could do without Random Pains That Crop Up For No Particular Reason

i had a cystoscopy the other day. I was told to expect some mild discomfort but within sconds they had to shout for another nurse to hold me down. i was literally screaming. If I ever have another one i would insist on being anesthetised.

I do wonder if I was partcularly sensitive to it as the guy who had had it before me had lulled me into a false sense of security by telling me it was no big deal. i'm still traumatised recalling it.