Staying Alive at 75

I turned 75 this month.

When Casey Sten­gel was 75, he said, “Most of the peo­ple my age is dead. You can look it up.” I did. He was right. In 1965 when he made that state­ment the aver­age age of death in the U.S. was 70. For men it was 67.

I was sur­prised to find that Casey’s pro­nounce­ment comes close to hold­ing true today. Even with all the advances in health­care, the aver­age age of death for U.S. men is now only 76.

That doesn’t give me much breath­ing room, so to speak, but at least I’m still alive on that mor­tal­i­ty table. Using an actu­ar­i­al analy­sis focus­ing sole­ly on the life expectan­cy of men born in 1947, I’m already dead. I passed away in 2012 when I was 65. For­tu­nate­ly, I didn’t notice.

Research­ing per­spec­tives on aging for this post, I found an arti­cle even more trou­bling than the death charts. In “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel asserts that the opti­mum age to die is the three-quar­ter-cen­tu­ry mark. He says our health­care sys­tem has suc­ceed­ed in find­ing ways to extend life but has failed to delay the onset of dis­abil­i­ties and dis­ease. We live longer only to suf­fer longer. At 75 he believes most peo­ple are head­ed into a steep phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive decline, ren­der­ing them inca­pable of mak­ing valu­able con­tri­bu­tions to soci­ety. “(F)eeble, inef­fec­tu­al, and pathet­ic,” they inflict a crush­ing finan­cial and emo­tion­al bur­den on their kids and grand­kids. To spare him­self and every­one else the mis­ery of his descent into infir­mi­ty, he intends to com­mit a pas­sive sui­cide by reject­ing pre­ven­tive health­care mea­sures and life-sav­ing pro­ce­dures after his 75^th birthday.

Dr. Emanuel’s cre­den­tials make it dif­fi­cult to dis­miss his dour view of aging. An inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned oncol­o­gist and bioethi­cist, he is the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pennsylvania’s Vice Provost, Chair of its Med­ical Ethics and Health Pol­i­cy Depart­ment, was an archi­tect of Oba­macare, and cur­rent­ly serves as a senior advis­er to the Biden admin­is­tra­tion on Covid-19.

He also seems to be a good guy with a lov­ing fam­i­ly and a lot to live for. He was 57 when he wrote his arti­cle. He’ll turn 65 this fall, so I hoped grow­ing old­er might change his opin­ion about life after 75.

It did not. In a recent inter­view, he held fast to his orig­i­nal premise, and when ques­tioned about exam­ples of peo­ple who are men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly capa­ble and pro­duc­tive well past 75, he dis­count­ed their con­tri­bu­tions. Such “out­liers” are “a very small num­ber,” he said, “and when I look at what those peo­ple ‘do,’ almost all of it is what I clas­si­fy as play … They’re rid­ing motor­cy­cles; they’re hik­ing … that’s not a mean­ing­ful life.”

Not a mean­ing­ful life.

Three days before Christ­mas five years ago, I woke up in the mid­dle of the night with a sear­ing pain in the upper right quad­rant of my abdomen beneath the ribcage. It spread upward to my shoul­der and became so intense I had to stretch out on the floor on my back with my arms over my head to breathe. I pushed through the pain, and it went away at sunrise.

“It was no big deal,” I told Cindy.

“Call the doc­tor,” she said. “Now.”

When she uses her steely tone of voice, I do what I’m told. I slunk into the doctor’s office that after­noon. He said my symp­toms indi­cat­ed a gall blad­der infec­tion, a com­mon prob­lem, eas­i­ly treat­able. He ordered an ultra­sound to con­firm his diagnosis.

I lay on my back while a tech­ni­cian moved a hand-held trans­duc­er over my abdomen and chest, up, down, and across. The doc­tor said the ultra­sound would take fif­teen min­utes. The tech­ni­cian kept at it for an hour.

The doc­tor called me at eight-thir­ty that night, well past his quit­ting time. “You have a gall blad­der infec­tion,” he said, “but not the nor­mal type. The ultra­sound indi­cates you have Acal­cu­lous Chole­cys­ti­tis.” He said I had to see a gas­troin­testi­nal sur­geon the next day.

“On Christ­mas Eve?” I said, alarmed. “How seri­ous is this?”

“It requires imme­di­ate attention.”

I pressed him. Reluc­tant­ly, he dis­closed the fatal­i­ty rate for this con­di­tion as 30 to 50 percent.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The gas­troin­testi­nal sur­geon, a mid­dle-aged sandy-haired guy with a big nose and wide mouth, was skep­ti­cal of the ultra­sound. Acal­cu­lous Chole­cys­ti­tis usu­al­ly attacks peo­ple suf­fer­ing from anoth­er seri­ous dis­ease, can­cer or heart fail­ure. I had no oth­er ill­ness. He ordered more tests.

Strapped to a gur­ney in the hospital’s nuclear med­i­cine depart­ment for three hours, I watched streams of mul­ti­col­ored flu­ids on a mon­i­tor above me as they coursed through my diges­tive sys­tem. The test results con­firmed the ultrasound’s diagnosis.

They wheeled me into the oper­at­ing room at five o’clock on Christ­mas Eve. An anes­the­si­ol­o­gist, a tall bald­ing man with a reas­sur­ing smile, pumped the con­tents of a syringe into my I.V. “Here comes the good stuff,” he said.

My last thought as the lights dimmed was a drug-blunt­ed fear that I might not wake up.

I was under for two hours.

A spindly crack in an off-white ceil­ing came into focus. I heard tap­ping beside me. I looked over to see a heavy-set young order­ly dressed in hos­pi­tal blues work­ing at a com­put­er. He looked up. “You’re back,” he said.

“How do you feel, Dad?”

I turned to see my son stand­ing beside my bed.

Behind him sit­ting at a desk by the wall, my sur­geon gave me thumbs up. “Your gall blad­der was gan­grenous,” he said. “I got it all.”

I sobbed. “Thanks for sav­ing my life,” I choked out.

“It’s the drugs,” the order­ly told my son. “Makes them emotional.”

It wasn’t the drugs. It was the stu­pen­dous joy of being alive.

A week lat­er, the results of my gall bladder’s biop­sy came back. They found an infin­i­tes­i­mal­ly small gall­stone buried in the gan­grenous tis­sue. All the tests had missed it. It had caused the infec­tion. The diag­no­sis had been wrong from the start. I nev­er had Acal­cu­lous Chole­cys­ti­tis. I had a nor­mal gall blad­der infec­tion. The only way it could have killed me was if I had refused to under­go the surgery to remove it.

I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time. Think­ing I might die gave me an appre­ci­a­tion for the bless­ings that were to come in the days still ahead of me. If I hadn’t sur­vived the infec­tion, here’s some of what I would have missed.

Grand­daugh­ter num­ber 1 blos­som­ing into one of the top fifty soc­cer play­ers in the nation in her age group. Grand­daugh­ter num­ber 2, also an elite soc­cer play­er, stand­ing at the front of her fifth-grade class­room on grand­par­ents’ day, telling every­one about fun times with Papaw. Grand­daugh­ter num­ber 3 falling in love with hors­es at three years old and becom­ing an expert rid­er at sev­en. Grand­son num­ber 1’s pre­co­cious tal­ents as a karate war­rior, skate­board­er, rail­road enthu­si­ast, and stu­dio artist. The births of grand­sons 2 and 3, both wild and crazy guys now three years old, one a future offen­sive line­man for the LA Rams, the oth­er des­tined to become a world-class heavy-equip­ment operator.

I would have missed build­ing a horse barn, tak­ing up horse­back rid­ing, bond­ing with Marge, Lily, Wil­son, and Jack­son, and the equine ther­a­py of a thou­sand trail rides.

I would have missed the heart-swelling exhil­a­ra­tion and qui­et sat­is­fac­tion of craft­ing the plot and char­ac­ter inter­play in The Judas Mur­ders, the cel­e­bra­tion of youth­ful first love in The Princess of Sug­ar Val­ley, and the cathar­tic self-real­iza­tions in Keep­ing the Promise and 20 more blog posts since its publication.

I would have missed watch­ing my younger daugh­ter mar­ry and build a hap­py fam­i­ly with the love of her life, my son’s care­ful expan­sion of his pros­per­ous busi­ness with­out skip­ping a beat in his role as a lov­ing father and hus­band, and my old­er daugh­ter and her hus­band achiev­ing inter­na­tion­al acclaim and com­mer­cial suc­cess for their art gallery.

I would have missed five more years of love and com­pan­ion­ship with Cindy along with the chance to become her care­giv­er and coach through two years of painful recov­er­ies from dou­ble knee replace­ments, a small install­ment on my great debt to her for fifty-three years of sup­port and encour­age­ment, prop­ping me up and keep­ing me going through good times and bad.

This is the short list. The full list of what I would have missed in the past five years would fill more pages than all my nov­els combined.

I don’t con­sid­er my life mean­ing­less. In many ways, it’s more mean­ing­ful today than ever before.

I won’t reject pre­ven­tive health­care mea­sures and life-sav­ing pro­ce­dures now that I’m 75. I’ll take all I can get. Dr. Emanuel is a real­ly smart guy, but on the sub­ject of aging, I pre­fer the med­ical advice of the poet: “Do not go gen­tle into that good night,/Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I could go on about the many gifts of grow­ing old­er, but I’ll rein it in for your sake and close by updat­ing words I wrote in this blog five years ago.

I’m 75 years old; I’ve lived a long full life; I’ve still got a good ways to go; and you ain’t seen noth­in’ yet.