This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

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.

xp Is it a dental thing? Like a tooth abscess or something?

i have never had a cavity! so i'm not sure what to expect from such things. if it comes back i guess i will soon find out

a cyst can be anywhere, sounds like they jabbed a needle in for a sample? ouch.

oh sorry, got confused by xps

I had a tooth fall out last weekend.

My first thought was, Who put a freakin' tooth inside my slice of pizza?

put it under yer pillow

Went to the dentist, who referred me to another dentist.

And now I'm weighing the thousands of dollars to get a new one, thinking, Maybe I'll be ok without one?

(It's a molar on the bottom row, so it's not like I look like Alfred E. Newman.)

Advantages of posting on the 50s thread: Namechecking Alfred E. Newman

I still strangely have all my teeth (except the wisdoms) but they're in rough shape.. I was neglectful in my punk youth but now I'm making up for it, dentist visits every 6 months and flossing at night
A buddy (not quite 50) just had to pay like six thousand dollars to have some kind of laser gum procedure, he hadn't been to the dentist in years; trying to avoid all that

can you cram it back in?

My first thought was, Who put a freakin' tooth inside my slice of pizza?

― pplains

been there twice, feelin ya

i still feel like a cassandra a lot of the time, like does it count if half of us are saying something is a huge fucking problem that we should do these specific things about and nothing ever gets done about and a bunch of people die and then they say "oh well THERE WAS NOTHING WE COULD HAVE DONE"

the cassandra strain or smth idk

also i posted this to the wrong thread so it makes no sense, never mind

Posting on the wrong thread is very “ilxors in their 50s,” it works.

LOL

can you cram it back in?

Not without some Elmer's.

Really the only reason I went to the dentist so fast is because the root is still in there. As laissez faire as I have been with my teeth, even I know that's a lightening rod for infection.

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

Could be an infection pressing on the nerve? A few years ago I had regular attacks of searing, unbelievable tooth pain - as if someone had prised a tooth out and jammed a hot needle into the exposed nerve - and it turned out to be some subterranean infection that required a wisdom tooth removed. Ouch!

Doctor was a little younger than me (of course), trying to make me feel better.

"It doesn't happen to everyone, but this sort of thing does happen occasionally to people your age..." ok, that could be taken the wrong way, but I'll let it pass...

"If it's not bothering you, then maybe you can wait..." Good, good...

"It's not like people are going to look at you and think you're a hillbilly..." Ok, he just WENT THERE...

I wish I had not googled cystoscopy *crosses legs in fear*

dentists will save teeth wherever possible, or replace them with expensive options, mainly because a gap means the next-door teeth have less support and are prone to spread into the space

i do worry about my 90s fillings. had a tooth break on me last month, a molar that was mostly filling.

anyone have some more up-to-date studies on implants? I have one, "need" another, but have heard mixed reports about long term stability?

I can confirm from work experience that dental implants are exceptionally stable if the bone is even moderately healthy. Not science obviously but those things are solid in jaws postmortem.

I just had my first one last year, it's been fine so far. It's next to another troublesome tooth, I have a feeling I may end up with two side by side.

I guess we can trust Jaq on this one.

What's the drill with cleaning them? Is it just like a normal tooth? Or do they require extra maintenance

I hope they don't need extra maintenance because I'm just brushing/flossing like a normal tooth.

Also lol I had not thought of it being lodged in my skull.

Remember goofy junior-high science fiction, where some kid with fillings or braces would start picking up radio signals from Moscow?

My teeth are pretty much in pieces at this point, I'm afraid. Several are ground down to the gum. I'd probably need at least five figures overseas to repair or remove, and probably an upper six figures to get them done here. They'll probably all be worn down or gone by the time I'm 65, and there's nothing I can do about it.

My teeth have been pretty fucked forever, but I started sleeping with one of those moulded mouthguard things a few years ago and that seems to have slowed the pace of destruction

I hate it (hate the concept, physically it is fine) and I put it off for years - but it seems to be making a big difference and I probably should have done it earlier - I hated having regular dental catastrophes more

I got a crown a year or so back, and I'm afraid I have not been taking care of it as scrupulously as I think I'm meant to - I tend not to floss, my teeth are very tight together and its very difficult. I've noticed a lot of nerve sensitvity reocurring recently which could mean the damn root under the crown is carking it. I dont want, and really cannot afford, rootcanal or implant replacement. Despite our excellent univeresal healthcare, dental (and mental) is the one area Australia shat the bed on and is thus hideously expensive.

one of my crowns fell out two days ago. i was eating a mini chocolate easter egg that was encased in a thin candy shell. this was during an in-person meeting at work. the crown came right off and i thought it was a piece of candy shell that had gone wrong in the manufacturing process. so i threw it away! five minutes later i’m rummaging in the bin for it. “don’t mind me”

oh btw i have my varifocals now and uh everything is warped and blurry unless i turn my head to look at it dead-on. this is progress????