Growing Old Is So Not Cool!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the virtues of growing old and how life in the twilight zone is going to be bliss. I have since changed my mind. Growing old is not bliss or filled with happy times with the grandkids but fraught with trying to keep the brain in sane and in check.

On DStv – Sony Max if memory serves me correct, there is a programme called 1,000 Ways to Die. 1,000 Ways to Die, is not for the faint hearted for it depicts horrid and gruesome ways in which people have died due to sheer stupidity. While many of the people on the show tend to be young, in the episode I watched, there was an old man who died in what I can only describe as a very ‘ouch, ouch, ouch’ way.

Old Man was in hospital (where else would he be?) and since Wifey departed to the heavens sometime ago, Old Man devised ways to satisfy his sexual lust. He could have gotten re-married, or looked for Girlfriend or employed the services of Prostitute but, his brain did not advise him to do any of that. Rather, it told him to stick 12 thermometers up his anus and that would give him all the pleasure he needed. He did. While he was lustfully gyrating on 12 mercury laden thermometers up his anus, Nurse walks in and startles him. Old Man falls backwards on to the bed and the 12 mercury laden thermometers shatter into tiny fragments filling his anus with mercury. He died horrible and painful death all because his aged brain, was no longer giving him sane information. It had gone cuckoos.

Doc, a friend, regularly travels abroad. On his return he always brings me back magazines and newspapers. In a magazine he brought back called Yours and flicking through the pages, I found it’s a magazine for the elderly. That got me thinking. Why did he give it to me? What is he hinting at?  

What I found frightful about Yours, are their classified adverts. There was an ad for waterproof pull on underwear – “underwear that feels like any ordinary underwear but has an added advantage of a built in waterproof pad with nylon fibre backing for old people with bladder problems.” Basically, it’s a washable ‘nappy’ though not as bulky or padded as the Pampers kids use today.

If the nappy underwear is not your thing, there is always the portable loo. The ad says: “The portable loo is easy to use and supplied with a female adaptor with an 800ml capacity.” What if you pee more than 800ml?  

And when your brain can no longer control the way you eat and drink, there is the “...full size adult bib” – I guess to stop you from dribbling and splattering juice and food all over yourself like your 18-month old grandkid.

There are also false teeth for those whose teeth have fallen out which will enable you to still bite into a chunky steak, go to Ntinda for pork ribs or devour a family bucket at KFC.

Ya la bi, it’s tight. I am now freaking out because I don’t want to spend my old age sticking thermometers up my anus for sexual pleasure nor do I want to wear my kids left over Pampers because my bladder has brake issues or carry a portable toilet whenever I go out.

I also don’t want to borrow my grandkid’s bib because I dribble juice down my shirt. And I certainly don’t want to eat my steak, pork or KFC with false teeth.

Growing old is not cool. My brain has to focus and not go bonkers. And I still need my youth!