Last month I turned 45 with a minimal amount of fanfare and not much in the way of trepidation. The only changes I really anticipated were a modest increase in gentle ribbing from Deanna based on her being six years younger, and an inability to any longer claim that I was in my "early 40's." Little did I know that immediately upon turning 45 both my luck and the warranty on my body would run out causing me to essentially become elderly overnight.
My actual birthday passed uneventfully. Only a nasty cough that had settled into my lungs a week or two prior gave any indication of trouble ahead. At the time, I assumed it to be merely a nagging leftover of the most recent rounds of kid-inflicted illnesses in the house.
As our planned Spring Break trip to Anaheim and San Diego approached, I thought periodically of visiting a doctor to look into the cough but figured a little sunshine and time away from work would knock it right out. This proved to be a poor assumption, as it never did get better. Each morning during our 10 day vacation, I would lean over a sink, coughing up bits of my lungs. As we traveled around, my periodic coughing fits spread fear throughout the Southern California natives (I could hear their frightened whispers: "Who let that consumptive into Legoland?? And so pale too. Maybe he's an escapee from a TB ward."). Even now, 5-weeks after its unheralded arrival, the cough remains, although antibiotics currently have it on the ropes at last.
Next, whether it was stuff related to the cough or simply the flight, my head felt full of muck and my left ear never "unpopped" following the flight to California, significantly decreasing hearing already long-impaired by too many rock band rehearsals and concerts in my younger days. This, combined with the kids annoying kid-habit of talking with their heads facing away from you or towards the ground, left me pretty much resorting to asking everyone to repeat anything they said to me during the trip. As the trip went on, my requests were shortened to an old-man like "eh?" each time I realized someone had said something to me.
On the third night of our trip, we were waiting in yet another line at Disney's California Adventure themepark (next door to Disneyland) as darkness fell when sweet 4-year old Cooper looked up at us and asked if we were going to see the fireworks. He was asking, he added, because it was our last night in Disneyland and because "fireworks make my heart happy." Parental hearts sufficiently melted, we bolted across the park, each carrying a 40+ pound kid at what might best be described as a loping, speed-walk, since the fireworks were actually taking place at Disneyland, where we were not. We caught the end of the fireworks, but not without some cost to my lower back - an unpleasant tweak to my lower back and its ruptured disk that periodically acts up. The sore back decided to stick around for the rest of the trip too, thus adding sleeping and walking, along with the previously mentioned breathing and hearing, on the list of activities that carried some level of difficulty and/or unpleasantness in the first month of my 45th year.
The fourth day of the trip, I managed to essentially serrate a fingertip with the five awesome blades of my Gillette Fusion razor. Bled a lot in the bathroom of our fancy hotel. While this injury did not particularly bother me, it did have an unfortunate one-two punch. One, it was positioned so that a band aid would not stay on for any length of time; and two, seeing it seemed to cause an immediate unpleasant reaction in the squeamish. It was indeed fairly unpleasant to look at. The solution, fairly constant application of band aids.
The fifth day was our first at the beautiful beaches of Coronado Island in San Diego. Feeling decent despite the travails of the first half of the trip, I spied a crab in a tidepool and decided to capture it for the kids. No problem, until I prepared, captured crab in hand, to jump off of the slippery slope of a wet rock onto the safety of the beach. What happened next before a crowd of onlookers was several seconds of slipping, attempting to regain my balance, and a nasty feeling that something bad had just happened to my right hamstring before I fell face-down into the tidepool. When I first got up, I had a bloody left knee and was unable to put any weight whatsoever on my right leg. Two of my charming children, despite our best efforts to teach them empathy, immediately asked where the now-escaped crab was. This injury, since diagnosed by my doctor as a partial hamstring tear, left me limping badly the remainder of the trip and with a scary-amount of bruising - so much blood emptying out of the torn muscle inside the leg that the entire back of my right thigh turned solid purple and during the course of the trip actually migrated down into my calf. Pretty freaky amount of bruising for an injury that involved no direct impact on the leg at all. Anyway, after this one, previously mundane tasks like putting on my right shoe or hoisting myself in and out of car seats became exciting but painful adventures.
A couple of days later, I decided to limp up to the hotel's lovely weight room, figuring that although my leg was shot, I could still do some non-leg-related exercises. Shortly after starting, I was leaning on a machine, trying to adjust the amount of weight (upward of course!). I shifted my weight off the part of the machine I had been leaning on and it sprang back to its resting position, causing a metal cross-bar to spring up into my face and cut a nice gash next to my right eye. The gash commenced to bleeding profusely, and continued to do so every time I optimistically removed the band-aid at any point during the next 24 hours. So not only did I quickly develop a black eye, but I had to wear a big band-aid adjacent to my eye for the next couple of days.
Despite all of the above, we really did have a great time. A quick shout out to Deanna for shouldering the parenting load, figuratively and literally, during vacation as I was fairly useless during certain stretches. She was very patient despite not particularly enjoying having an elderly traveling partner.
Anyway, if this was the year 1511, I would be pretty excited to be alive at the ripe old age of 45 with nothing but a bad limp, suspect back, consumption, marginal hearing and eye and finger injuries. But it is not 1511. One or more of you may be inclined to say something optimistic to me, like "those injuries sound unpleasant and it is unfortunate they happened on vacation, but they don't sound permanent so you can probably eke out another few decades before permanently assuming the mantle of old man." To you, I simply respond "eh?" Yep, I should've bought that extended warranty when I had the chance.
So, let's say you are employed as a marketing consultant by the Midwest Dairy Association. The Association rings you up one day and asks you to come up with an idea to increase the health profile of chocolate milk. Charged with this task, would you, in a million years, come up with the idea to try to position chocolate milk as the new Gatorade? And, assuming you took such an ambitious tack in your assignment, would you decide that the best way to position chocolate milk as the new Gatorade would be to create a fictional race of small green stuffed monsters, called ChocoNoGos, and to spread the word that ChocoNoGos are "a group of creatures that live to sabotage athletic performance by draining athletes of nutrients" and that these creatures "hate physical consistency, excellence and chocolate milk"? No? You wouldn't? Well obviously you are not thinking far enough out of the box to be a highly paid (or perhaps soon to be unemployed) marketing consultant.
