Tag: illness

40 and growing old

Recently (less than a month ago) my daughter came to me and said “appa, this December you’ll be turning 40. Then you will start becoming old”. Instinctively I got a little upset, and then gave her a little lecture on how aging is a continuous process, and not a discrete one.

That how much I age between 38 and 39, and between 39 and 40, and between 40 and 41 is not so different. You age just a little more each year, but well at a faster rate (aging is nonlinear). And so using an arbitrary cutoff like 40 is not proper, I told her.

But then, thinking about it, I realised that my daughter is not alone in feeling this way. I actually remember, back in the day, calling my father “old” when he turned 40. Maybe it was due to his grey hair. Maybe because most sportspersons retired well before 40 (that said, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe were both very much active then (1992-93) ).

I don’t think my father gave me a lecture on continuous aging, but I remember him feeling rather annoyed that I had called him “old”.

And then recently an aunt sent a photo to one of my family WhatsApp group. It featured my parents, and they were 42 when the photo was taken. And in that, my father visibly looks old.

Now, we had bought our “family camera” by then (a Canon SnappyQ), but we seldom took photos, so I don’t have too many recollections of what my father looked like at that age. I frequently see family albums from 1990 and 1992 (some vacations), and from much later in the 90s, and there is a discontinuity in how my father looks in both (grey and thinning hair, paunch, etc.).

What this 1995 photo that my aunt sent recently showed me is that by then my father already looked much closer to what he looked like in his late forties and early fifties (he didn’t live much longer beyond that) than what he looked like in his thirties.

I would be lying if I were to say that the picture didn’t scare me. And instinctively I felt a bit better about calling him “old” when he was 40. And I felt a bit better about my daughter saying that “this december I will start becoming old”.

Then again I’m starting to wonder what I can do to not suddenly start aging now. Hair volume and colour I have no control over. General fitness I guess I do. Or maybe not – I have too much of a sweet tooth.

On which point I need to go full bimodal about food – as things stand I end up having “a little” junk food and “a little” alcohol on most days, but in terms of returns in terms of feeling good, I’m not sure if this is the best strategy. Should I go barbell instead?

 

PS: In most places where I need to submit a photo, I use one that was taken when I was 36, when an old friend was trying to build a career in portrait photography and used me as a guinea pig. I wonder how long I can use that.

Sudden death and the discount rate

It’s six years today since my mother passed away. She died in the early hours of Friday, 23rd October 2009 following a rather brief illness. The official death summary that the hospital issued reported the cause of her death as “sepsis”. She only officially died on the 23rd. As far as I’m concerned, I’d lost her two Mondays earlier, on 12th October 2009, when she complained of extreme breathing difficulty and was put on ventilator in the ICU.

Looking back (this year’s calendar is identical to that of 2009, so memories of that year have been coming back rather strongly this year), I realise that the suddenness with which it all happened have left me with a deep sense of paranoia, which can be described in financial terms as a “high discount rate”.

Having moved back from Gurgaon in June of that year, my mother and I had settled down in a rented house in Tata Silk Farm (she didn’t want to go back to our own house in Kathriguppe where we’d lived until 2008). She had settled well, and living not far from her sisters, had developed a nice routine. There were certain temples she would visit on certain days of the week, for example.

And then suddenly one day in September she complained of breathing trouble (she took thirty minutes to walk from our then house to my aunt’s house, which is only a ten minute walk away). Initial medical tests revealed nothing. More tests were prescribed, as her breathing got worse. There was no diagnosis yet.

She started seeing specialists – a pulmonologist and her cardiovascular surgeon (she had had trouble with some veins for a few years). More tests. Things getting worse. And before we knew it, she was in hospital – for a “routine three day admission” for an invasive test. The test got postponed, and the surgery finally done a week later. She got out of the ICU and remained there for hardly two days before she complained of insane breathing trouble and had to be put on ventilator – the only purpose the 12 days she spent on that served was to help me prepare for her impending death.

In all, it took less than a month end to end – from initially complaining of breathlessness to going on ventilator. What seemed to be a harmless problem leading to death.

I realise it’s caused insane paranoia in me which I’m yet to come out of. Every time I, or a relative or a friend, show minor signs of sickness, I start fearing the worst. I stop thinking about the symptoms in a Bayesian fashion – by looking at prior probabilities of the various illnesses that could be causing them – and overweight the more morbid causes of the symptoms. And that adds paranoia and anxiety to what I’m already suffering from.

Like two weeks back I had a little trouble breathing, but no apparent cold. It wasn’t something that happens to me normally. A quick Bayesian analysis would have revealed that the most probable cause is a sinus (which it was), but I spent half a day wondering what had become of me before I applied Vicks and quickly recovered. When my wife told me a week after she reached the US that she had got a high fever, I got paranoid again before realising that the most probable cause was a flu caused due to a change of seasons (which it was!).

Another consequence of my mother’s rather sudden death in 2009 (and my father’s death in 2007, though that was by no means sudden, as he had been diagnosed with cancer two years earlier) was that I suddenly stopped being able to make plans. I started overestimating the odds of something drastic happening, and planning didn’t make sense in such scenarios, I reasoned. As a consequence I became extremely short-term in my thinking, and couldn’t see beyond a few days away.

There have been several occasions where I’ve left a decision (such as booking tickets for something, for example) until it has been too late. There have been times when I’ve optimised for too short a term in some of my decisions, effectively jacking up my “discount rate”.

I’d written a while earlier about how in case of rare events, the probabilities we observe can be much higher than actual probabilities, and how that can lead to impaired decision-making. Thinking about it now, I’ve seen that playing out in my life over the last six years.  And it will take a considerable amount of effort to become more rational (i.e. use the “true” rather than “observed” probabilities) in these things.

Alcohol and Shit

I started drinking when I was 21, after I had graduated from IIT. To most, that might sound surprising, but it’s a fact. It wasn’t supposed to be that way – I had initially planned to make my alcohol debut in my last week at IIT, just before the final exams. However, I ended up falling sick and missed the occasion. It would be another two months and entry into another institute of national importance before I finally broke my duck.

There are several reasons that could possibly explain my delay in experimentation with alcohol (you read that right – despite ample opportunity I never even considered experimenting with alcohol at IIT). But thinking back at those days the most compelling one is shit. Yeah, you read that right. I delayed my experimentation with alcohol because I was afraid of what shit it would lead to. Literally.

In the middle of my first night at IIT, I ended up in hospital. Yes, you read that right. The first day had gone alright. My father had accompanied me and helped me set up my third of the room. I had opened a bank account, registered myself at the mess, and after my father left in the evening, went about exploring campus and venturing into other hostels to meet people I know (a cardinal mistake by an IIT “freshie” but somehow I escaped getting caught).

And then in the middle of the night it started. A few trips to the loo later I figured it was time to seek help (it’s not that I wasn’t prepared – my belongings included a sheet of Andial – reputed to put an instant stop to the toughest of shit. But I ended up puking it out that day). I woke up Paddy the Pradeep, who was the only person in my hostel I knew well. He called the institute hospital, which sent an ambulance, and I spent the rest of the night in the hospital, with some shots and on drips. The next morning I was fit enough to be attending the orientation ceremony.

As if this wasn’t enough, shit problems struck again a month down the line, this time during the first round of exams. To make matters worse, the hostel had water problems (always an issue in Chennai). And the institute hospital’s medications wouldn’t seem to help. It was a nightmare.

It was around then that my classmates had settled down in the institute and started experimenting in life. As they began their experimentation I began to notice, and be told stories of, some side effects. If you drank too much you would puke. If you drank too much, the next morning you would have a hangover. And it was only after you shat that the hangover would pass, i was told. It all sounded like so much of a nightmare to me, who was already scarred about any potential stomach problems. There was no way I was going to try something that would give me more shit.

It was after I moved to an institute with reasonably assured water supply that I started my experimentation. Experiments were mostly successful (except for occasional infringements like this and this and this ). Shit wasn’t so much of a problem at all, I realized. The experimentation, though delayed, had ultimately been successful.

It’s of late – perhaps in the last one year – that I’ve noticed a peculiar problem. Whenever I have a few rounds (few can be as few as one) of Vodka or Beer, it results in terrible shit the following day. You get the normal dump right in the morning. But the real bad shit comes out in two installments, usually one after breakfast and one after lunch. It’s really foul-smelling (normally you shouldn’t mind the smell of your own shit or fart, but this is exceptionally bad). It causes great pressure (which means you better stay not far from a toilet). And when it comes out it results in insane pleasure.

One interesting thing is that this happens only when i consume beer or vodka. It never happens with whisky (the kind of alcohol I most often imbibe) – not even with cheap IMFL whisky. With whisky I can drink copious amounts, get drunk, and carry on the next morning like I had fruit juice the previous night. But not with beer or vodka – does anyone have an explanation for this?

You might have guessed that the gritter for this post was certain events last night and this morning. That’s right. At a party last night I didn’t realize that they were serving whisky, too, and went for beer (UB Export Strong – also known as “Yaake Cool Drink”). Having started I had more rounds of it. And after breakfast this morning it’s started acting! If only I’d gone for the whisky!