What Happened to Older and Wiser?

By Marilyn L. Pinsky

Last spring I spent every day from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. for three months in an infectious disease unit getting antibiotic infusions.

Why?

I had a lot of family events happening and ignored something growing under one of my beautiful, fake fingernails, until what turned out to be an infection got so bad that I almost lost my finger.

I heard about other things people did that brought them to the infectious disease unit. One guy was doing a good deed for his neighbor by racing out in the rain to bring in her garbage can and because he didn’t want to ruin a good pair of shoes, he grabbed his old ones. A rusty nail hidden in the mud went through the thin soles of the old shoes, causing an infection and now he was also doing three months of antibiotic infusion.

Then there is my friend Anne, who like me and other friends, really love our shoes (this is not considered a fetish if you’re a female, but we can certainly discuss that later if you need). However, thought must be given to the relationship between age and heel height. “I was running outside to get in my car (in a tall wedge), slipped and fell,” explained Anne. “I ended up in a boot for six weeks! I now refer to those as “my stupid shoes.”

Danger lurks everywhere. How about those packages in which a dead chicken can probably remain edible for 20 years, but you can kill yourself trying to open the package? When you get so frustrated because not having the grip strength to pull off the plastic covering, you grab a knife, stab at it, the knife slips and you stab yourself instead. Chicken: 1. You: 0.

Then there’s the jar of mustard with the plastic collar around the lid that you can hardly see and have to use a knife to get it off. If you don’t have enough hand strength to twist it off (that’s me) you’re probably not that good at wielding a knife to do it.

Things that are labeled child-proof can also lead you to take drastic measures to get them open. Not everything comes with non-child-proof options and if anyone knows a solution to this one, I’d love to hear it.

You think the kitchen is dangerous? I now know three people who broke their pelvis heading into the bathroom in the middle of the night. I think part of the answer to that is a motion activated nightlight. (Just had an argument with my daughter on how could I write about this when I don’t have one myself? My defense was the light would wake me up and I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. I think I lost that argument and yes, Lauren, I am going to buy one.) And then there is not reading the instructions on prescriptions.

I win the “Mindless Award of the Month” for that one. Drug stores seem to be so short-staffed nowadays that they don’t always have time to say, “as this is your first time taking this medication, do you want to speak to the pharmacist?” By the way, the answer should always be “yes” if you are given the option.

But not having been given the option and not being smart enough to have asked to speak to the pharmacist or read the directions on my own, I went through a month’s worth of antibiotic cream in one week. I should have been using a tenth of the amount and not being able to get a refill before the month was out was one problem; the other was what it did to my skin. I’m chalking that up to being taught one more expensive and painful lesson.

The question now is, did all of this make me wiser? I guess the answer is when you add in stubborn, older and wiser don’t necessarily go together.