Getting to know Arthur Ritis

With all good intentions, people say to me "Oh, you're not old! ...
"My uncle is ninety and he walks eight miles a day." 

Lucky Unk.  I hope he never meets that old bully Arthur Ritis or his mean wife Sciatica.

--Ursula K Le Guin, No Time to Spare, "Going Over Eighty: The Sissy Strikes Back"

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Fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin was 81 years old when she stepped from fantasy fiction to harsh (if often funny) reality in her published collection of essays from her blog.  

The quotation above is take from one of her earlier posts.  She was sick of being told "You're only as  old as you think you are."  Such comments, she feels, are well meant, but encourage older people to deny the obvious changes in their bodies, and their obvious resulting inability to still act like a kid.

She herself suffered from arthritis and sciatica at 81.  She didn't drive.  Her formerly enjoyable walk to the grocery store to pick up one item or another was now a torment -- she was forced to limit her grocery visits to one per week, keeping a list during the week of her needs for the visit.

I chuckled sympathetically when I read her little essay a couple of years ago.  I didn't realize how quickly one can go from being a light-limbed and light-hearted youth to an arthritic cripple.

"Cripple" is a bit of an exaggeration.  I can still get around; I can walk a couple of miles with only minimal pain.  But so far, I haven't been able to walk much farther than that without developing pain not only while walking, but for the next day or two.

What's been surprising to me is how quickly it all happened.  If you skim over my blog essays for the past six months or so, you'll note that I was still hiking steep paths without complaint last May.  In July, I developed a strained groin muscle that very gradually became more painful.  In July, I decided to cut back the distance of my daily walks from four to five miles a day to something like two.  Within a couple of weeks, without known cause, I began having Achilles tendon pain in the same leg.  

Note that the groin strain and the tendinitis were both annoyances of the sort that are somewhat easily treated, primarily with rest.  But by the beginning of August, I was developing knee pain in the opposite leg.  At first the pain was minor, but it soon became more worrisome than the Achilles tendinitis.  (By that time, the groin muscle was no longer really a factor.)  By the time I left with friends for Scotland at the end of August, it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to participate in the group's daily hikes.

I saw an orthopedist, whose radiology revealed moderate arthritis.     He suggested physical therapy.  The plan would be to strengthen my leg muscles, thus increasing the stability of my knee joint, and reducing or eliminating pain.  I haven't really done that, of course.

A friend tells me that his wife found physical therapy to be useless in combatting her arthritis, but that she's intrigued by a remedy that her grandmother swears by -- raisins soaked in gin.

Intellectually absurd, but tempting.  Even without the raisins.

I do something occasionally similar to consuming gin, but with fewer side effects -- I take a Tylenol or two.  Even one reduces the pain noticeably, but doesn't entirely eliminate it.  I kind of like the background sensation of mild pain, because it reminds me not to get carried away and walk long distances before my body's used to it.  

If it ever will be.  Most on-line experts say that you're stuck with arthritis for the rest of your life.  The only change is that it generally gets gradually worse.

Anyway, I don't take Tylenol regularly, at least yet.  Taken too often and in too great a quantity, it ain't good for your innards.

I go back over my years of writings, in this blog and before, about the hikes and climbs I've taken.  Many of them were exhausting, some even painful.  But the exhaustion came from my lungs' efforts to suck in enough oxygen.  And the pain came from the pain that younger muscles feel as they learn to work harder and longer with training.

These little essays make me sad, knowing that they document challenging hikes and climbs, most of which I'll never be able to do again.  But reading about them makes me happy that I did them when I did, year after year, always exhausted but always happy.

I've passed on the moral that I derive from my life history to my younger friends on Facebook:

"Don't kid yourself that you're too busy with work and family to go hiking or climbing now, but that you look forward to doing it when you have time, once you retire." 

Because maybe you won't.