I’VE said it more than once, but I’ll say it again.
Only because I’ve just come back from a school reunion – which was nowhere near the gathering it has been in years past.
In fact I reckon the poor galoot in charge of organising this year’s show (we only have it every other year thank heavens) spent more time reading out his list of who had died since we last got together, followed by the list of those who were too sick, too frail or way too forgetful to be trusted out on their own.
Perhaps if this litany of doom and gloom had stopped there, I still might have enjoyed myself, being the hale and hearty chap I am.
But I was like an island in an ocean of age and illness.
When we sat down for dinner I was flanked by a mate who had been in the footy team with me. Cricket too. He was more fringe in track and field and wasn’t a bad member of the squash team.
Now he’s just a husk of a human.
All he wanted to discuss was his medication – starting each day with his diuretics, the different coloured pills helping him manage his blood pressure, his cholesterol and his occasional vertigo.
Then there was the oedema in his right leg, a bit of bursitis here and there, a hip he was certain would have to be replaced sooner rather than later – and his occasional loss of hearing.
If I had to spend a whole day with him I would have almost killed for a loss of hearing.
Completing my unfortunate flanking was a woman I had hankered for something pathetic as a youngster. But not anymore.
She was talking to a girlfriend sitting on her far side and neither one of them was far enough away.
Because despite enduring the medical mumbo jumbo from the old mate, nothing in life had really prepared me for having to overhear the two discussing their versions of their medical profiles, intrinsically bound up with their “women’s issues” at a decibel rate which left nothing to the imagination as they coped with each other’s reduced hearing and the general hubbub going on around us.
All I wanted to do was bolt.
And don’t think I couldn’t. Well, alright, it might be a reasonably steady jog. But glancing around me I was pretty confident I was the only person, man or woman, who could get out of sight on a dark night.
To describe the event as one of the worst days of my social life might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but the whole day left a decidedly sour taste and it took me a few days to get over it all and get on with the day.
Do I take any medication?
Nope.
Except the occasional Panadol or similar, depending where the specials were when the missus was doing the shopping.
Although last year I remember demanding something such as morphine (and getting it) when one of the sale bulls saw fit to not just tread on my right foot, but to stand there a while and then give his hoof a good twist before agreeing to move on at his pace, despite me flogging him with my tongue and two fists beating a tattoo on his back.
Let me tell you, that’s fantastic stuff. The morphine, not the bull on your foot.
And for all my old school cobbers who might be reading this (I would think it mandatory reading for them all) let me tell you something else.
If you do end up in the hospital and you are unfortunate enough to need morphine, when the nurses come around four hours later to see if you want more, never say yes.
Because if you do you are back on the Panadol and you never see the opiates trolley again, no matter how bad the pain in your foot, now offset by a pain-in-the-arse nurse.
So what you do is tell them you think you are OK, and knock back even the Panadol. They’ll be back in two hours to check, so you suggest it is starting to hurt but you think it will be OK.
The next call, two hours later, you spring the trap: “I’m really sorry, but the Panadol doesn’t seem to have touched it and the pain is really bad.”
So you are six hours (give or take) out from your last (and first) dose of morphine and 99 per cent of the time the nurse gives you one more shot. Almost certainly the last you’ll get.
If they keep handing it out from there, you’d better hope your will is in order because you are as good as dead and there’s no risk you’ll be an addict before you make the morgue.
But I digress.
What was it I’ve said before, and will say again?
Oh, yeah, that’s it.
If I ever find the guy who came up with the line that these are our golden years, I am going to knock him into next week.
But in two years I also reckon the chances of me making another class reunion will slim to none – and slim has already caught the bus out of town.
Not because I will be a dead morphine addict. No, I simply wouldn’t be seen dead at another pharmacy workshop like that.
