Nick Tingle's Blog

By virtue of my birthday, December 14, 1945, I am on the very cutting edge of the so-called baby boomers, and by virtue of that fact, I have been frequently just slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to fads. For example I was drinking Perrier (anybody remember that) well before Time magazine did a cover story on it. The same was true for the coffee craze and later high class ice cream. Also, sadly, I have been on the cutting edge of physical complaints. I had gingivitis long before Time ran a cover story on that. And now I find a lengthy article in the New Yorker on tinnitus–written clearly in partial response to boomers. The article reports that as of now 12% of men and 14% of women over the age of 65 have some form of ringing in the ear.

And when all those baby boomers hit 65 the number of people walking around with some noise in their ears will be enormous. A whole new industry may be developed around trying to figure out what it is and how to get rid of it.

First they really don’t know what it is? Well, they know that–it’s a noise in the ear. But wait. That’s the problem. They don’t know where it is. One person for example had his or her whole ear removed because of cancer and still had tinnitus in that ear even though the ear was gone. So you can’t say it’s noise in the ear. One has to say, it’s a noise. But that would fail to indicate that it’s tinnitus.

No longer will people be able to say dismissively, "Oh, it’s all in your head." Sure, one can say back, that may be the case but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

How the hell I am able to hear something in my ear that isn’t in my ear is a mystery to me. It’s there all right, though. In my left ear and not my right or any other place. Something neurologically is going on.

Thankfully my tinnitus is apparently very mild. One poor fellow has it so bad that his life has been disrupted. He hears it all the time at high volume. One day he went outside during a thunder storm and stood by a flag pole hoping lightening would strike and carry him off. That’s one of the more bizarre attempts at suicide I have heard of.

Also I appear to have stumbled on a cure. I don’t know why I thought of it, but I bought a really cheap white noise machine about the size of a pancake. It sits next to my bed and makes white noises, like the sound of surf or the sound of rain. Unfortunately, the soothing surf sounds are punctuated by the squeaks of sea gulls and the sound of rain sounds more like static on a television. I settled for the water fall sound, which doesn’t sound like a water fall but is nonetheless soothing.

I find that, if the tinnitus really starts to aggravate me, all I have to do is move my hearing from the tinnitus to the white noise and bingo the tinnitus goes away. How I switch my hearing like that, I don’t know. But then I don’t know how I move my eyeballs either.

But that is one of the "cures" now being promoted. White noise. Also they have developed hearing aides that pick up more background sounds, like the sound of a refrigerator, and for some that too works to "block" the tinnitus.

I don’t know why they feature nature sounds on those white noise machines. I think they should make an urban sounds white noise machine that includes, for example, the sound of a refrigerator. I also find the sound of the dishwasher mildly soothing as long as something is not banging about in it.

About three weeks ago, I lugged some groceries into the house and noticed, not long after, pain in both knees, though much worse in the left. I thought it wasn’t so bad, a little swelling maybe but not enough to deter me from my daily exercise. That was a mistake because right about in there I began to experience that old dull ache almost constantly. I could walk ok, albeit with a hobble, and I took to getting to school early to make sure I wouldn’t rush and inadvertently hurt myself. I trudged along on the far right, with everybody, even little people with short legs, leaving me in the dust.

The pain from that little humiliation was slight compared to the fact that the damn knees began to disturb my sleep. I couldn’t find a place–as I tossed this way and that–that it didn’t hurt, just enough to keep me from lapsing into my usual torporous sleep. So I was wide away and just had to wait for utter fatigue to carry me off–and that knowing that tomorrow as going to be an extra busy day. Or I would wake at three am and the leg aching and nothing I could do about it but pound more Advil, hoping I didn’t blow a hole in my stomach.

So finally Carol did it for me and got me an appointment with a knee doctor, though I had to wait a week to see a real knee doctor and not a PA.

I go in yesterday and walk up to the doctor desk and am told by the receptionist to truck over to X-ray. So I trudge over there and am taken to a little room and told to go into this little closet and take off my pants and put on my smock and lock my clothes and belongings in the closet and when I have done that go sit in the waiting area–which I do in my smock, with my white thin legs sticking out, and holding in one hand the key to the closet. Then they do the X-rays. First stand here, then stand there, then lie down, the roll over. And after that I re-clothe and go back to the reception area and wait for the doctor and about this time Carol shows up to keep me company.

Finally I get to tell the doctor guy what’s up and he just sits there and then points at the X-ray and says, "Your right knee there’s got bone on bone and early onset arthritis." This panics me because I am sure I am aging prematurely because of evil things I have done and ask, "Do you mean it’s early for a person like me to get arthritis." No, he just means it’s arthritis in the early stages of a progressive degeneration.

Great! And what are my options?

Not many actually. Evidence is now in that arthroscopic for this kind of thing frequently doesn’t work at all and may make things worse. He has seen that he says in his own practice (he is filling in for a doctor who hurt his foot). But he can give he a cortisone shot–which he sets about doing immediately. The needle looks really long and goes in a long way but only into the empty cavity behind the knee.

So now I am on steroids. I may get relief for up to a couple of months and then the knee may ache again. But I can come in for another cortisone shot–and so on.

I am being set up for the Cadillac of knee surgeries: knee replacement.

Getting old is a crock. I don’t want to boldly go where this is taking me.

Last Thursday was it—at the doctor’s—I told the medical person that sometimes when I flex my hand little popping noises (smaller versions of the ones that come out of my knee) come out of it and sometimes those noises are accompanied by twinges of pain and when during one of those times I squeezed one of my finger joints it was sore—and she said, arthritis, and if she didn’t shrug, she might as well have…

Because, well you, arthritis is just one of those things that comes along with the aging process and there isn’t a whole lot one can do about it except hope that it doesn’t get worse or so bad that you are in pain all the time and your movements become restricted.

Brother Steve and I compared notes on aches and pains over the phone recently.  He has bad things going on with his left knee and I didn’t know it but he also has some pretty serious stuff going on with his right shoulder probably from carrying that mail sack all those years (or maybe it was his left shoulder).  I too have some deep shoulder pain probably from too much basketball and possibly also from that time a number of years back when I swam a mile a day for something like a 100 days in a row.  That was stupid.

Earlier this week I carried some groceries from the car into the house and later that day both of my knees became swollen.  Perhaps I carried too much weight or maybe I twisted something while carrying the groceries.  This is strange new territory where you have to worry about carrying too many groceries or wondering if that pain in your fingers when you reach for the toothbrush is going to get worse.

I can’t find much consolation at the moment and probably I am letting these things get to me a bit too much.  But how exactly does one contemplate the prospect of inevitable decline with equanimity?

As nephew Brian correctly noted it shouldn’t take a scientist to figure out that people getting the same rash at the same time does not mean the rash is contagious, for certainly, and of course—as Carol also pointed out to me—the persons so affected may have been exposed simultaneously to some toxic element in the environment.  Who knows but perhaps some noxious material was released from the walls when the plumbing people knocked holes in them to put in the new pipe.  That’s a possibility. 

And I was wrong too about the rash being pityriasis rosea.  I went in for my yearly physical, and when my medical person looked at the rash she said it was dermatitis.  As a diagnosis, this was not very helpful since dermatitis means “inflammation of the skin (rashes).”  Well, yea, I knew that: that I had a rash I mean.

The medical person checked me out pretty thoroughly; and was happy to be reminded that I had recently received an anal probe from the urologist so she didn’t have to do it.  I was relieved too actually.  I don’t much enjoy that business.  Or the yearly physical, for that matter.  I still have to go in to have blood drawn for the blood panel work up.  Damn! I don’t want to do that either.

Then after the physical, we had to split to go back to the title company that drew up the papers for the refinancing of the condo.  We had gone there before the doctor and we had spent a good half an hour or more going through an endless stream of documents, initialing and signing them, and then Carol noticed that the address they had for us on all the documents said Santa Barbara.  But we don’t live there; we live in Goleta.  So the person we were talking to phoned the people who drew up the paper and they said—damn it!—that the paper would have to be redrawn and we would have to resign everything.

I just sat there.  Resolved, I guess; because I have become used to casual incompetence from banks and money people.  So then we went to the doctor and then we went back to sign the documents.  By then it was dark and the placed was closed, and when we tried to get out of the building we found out we were locked in.

I just stood there.  Resolved to incompetence.

But we got the papers signed and I learned that I don’t have pityriasis rosea.  Just dermatitis.  I have made an appointment with the dermatologist about that and to have him look at something that is growing behind my left ear—by which I mean the portion of my left ear nearest the skull.