Tag: middle age

I Left My Shit on the Porch (Literally)

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Christin Haws aka KikiWrites, a white woman with short dark hair and grey-blue eyes, is drinking out of a white coffee much with blue text that reads 'I could use a little moral support...immoral support would be fine too…' and has a little face with a tongue sticking out in the middle.In January, I turned 45. In June, I had my yearly check-up with my primary doctor, where she informed me that it was time to do my first colon cancer check.

Ah, yes. I had been warned of this at my med check in December when my 45th birthday was less than a month away. The age for colon cancer screenings has been lowered to 45 and than meant it would be coming for me by our next appointment.

And she didn’t forget.

My doctor gave me two options because I’m at average risk for colon cancer. She said that I could do the full shebang colonoscopy that required the day and a half of prep, much of which would be spent on the toilet clearing out my bowels of everything I’d eaten in the last six to seven years, and the procedure, which would require me to be put under anesthesia, which meant I’d need someone to drive me to and from the procedure, and given my history of anesthesia, probably take care of me for the rest of the day because holy shit does it render me useless. So, we’re talking a two to three day ordeal, but if it came back negative, I wouldn’t have to do it again for another ten years.

The other option was Colaguard. They send you the kit, you collect the sample, you send it back, and if it comes back negative, you don’t have to do it again for three years, at which time you could always ask to do a proper colonoscopy.

Given everything going on in my life at the time -my father’s health, being his primary caretaker, not having someone who could take care of me- I chose to shit in a box.

Let me be perfectly clear: Colaguard is great. It makes it very easy to do this in the comfort of your own bathroom. Everything you need is included in the box. The step-by-step instructions are clear. Sending the sample back is easy. They make this so easy and so convenient. It’s honestly terrific. Their entire gig is 10/10. No complaints.

However.

I ended up receiving my Colaguard while my father was doing his latest stint in the hospital and I was driving 30 minutes back and forth to see him in the hospital before work. I was also due for fasting blood work to be done, and was struggling to get that accomplished. So, I was a little bit stressed and didn’t really have time to be dealing with this. But they prefer that you provide the sample soonish after receiving your kit, so I was then further pressed to find a time when I had time to do this and when I’d be prepared to give the sample, if you know what I mean.

The Friday of the week I received my kit I suppose fortune smiled on me. It was my day off. I was sitting at the local hospital waiting to get my blood work done (and starving in the process) when my father called to let me know that he was being discharged. I arranged to pick him up later than afternoon so I could get my blood work done (since that was already happening), run some errands, and do a little housework, which I’d been neglecting due to lack of time, energy, and will to live. And as fate would have it, I was also blessed with an urge to shit.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to do this while I was home alone because I was a giggling goober while getting everything set up. To make this as mess-free as possible, Colaguard provides you with a kind of holder that goes across your toilet that the specimen cup sits right in. You poop directly in the cup, no shit fishing required. It’s great.

However.

Where that cup sits is right under your butt. You can feel it touching your cheeks. Or maybe I can feel it touch my cheeks because I have such ample cheeks. And I don’t know about your body, but my body says that if something is touching me in that fashion, I cannot poop. Not supposed to poop there. This is a no pooping zone.

So, here I am, 45 years old, doing an out loud pep talk to myself to get me to shit in a cup. Hire me out as a motivational speaker because I eventually convinced myself to do it.

Once you shit in the specimen container, you do have to obtain a separate sample to be put in a tube with some liquid. Again, they make it as easy and mess-free as possible. You swirl this little specimen stick in your shit, get a sample on the end of the stick, and put the whole stick in a tube.. Easy. Unless you’re me. Then you find yourself questioning whether or not there’s an ample amount of shit on the end of your stick. Eventually -probably a minute and multiple swirls too long- I convinced myself that it was good enough.

I got everything labeled and preserved (my doctor made sure to tell me that the liquid included in the kit was for preserving the shit and not to be taken internally, as some people had apparently made that mistake) and packaged up. I then need to schedule a delivery. By this point in the day, my shit would have to be picked up on Saturday. That’s fine. I put it on the mail table by the front door and went on with my day, including picking up my discharged father from the hospital, who found it very amusing that my shit was sitting by the front door.

I put my shit on the front porch the next morning before I went to work so the UPS guy could pick it up.

Now, here’s the thing.

They don’t give you a time for the pick up, just the day. I know that the UPS guy delivers in the afternoon, but having never had him pick anything up before, I had no idea if he did that at a different time. As it turns out, he picks up when he drops off. But I didn’t know that until it happened. So, my shit sat on the front porch all day and I spent all day fretting about my shit on the front porch. Because it was hot and my front porch isn’t covered. Would my shit get too hot if it sat out there too long? Would that ruin the sample? Would I have to go through this again? Would the UPS man hold it against me because I made him pick up my shit? The mind runs wild while you’re waiting for your shit to disappear from the front porch.

To free you from the suspense, the UPS man picked up my shit, the sample was received just fine, and, most importantly, it was negative.

I look forward to doing this all again in three years.

So, if you’re 45 or older, get your colon cancer screenings, and if you’re of average risk and not up to a colonoscopy, I highly suggest going the Colaguard route.

It’s a worthwhile adventure.

And We’ve Got Ants (The Burnout Is Real)

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Black and white photo of a puddle on pavement with several leaves floating on the surface.June and July were spectacularly challenging months.

My father ended up in the ER four times in June. The first time was early in the month with what was determined to be a COPD flare up. He then went twice in the same weekend later in the month, first for abdominal pain, and then for difficulty breathing. The latter led to a 911 call at 3 in the morning and him being hospitalized for four days.

While he was in the hospital, I was driving 30 minutes each way visiting him every day while also working and trying to figure out when I was going to get my yearly blood work done, and how I was going to get my colon cancer check done (that turned out to be an interesting side quest), and when I was going to get the housework done and the errands run. I had planned on using my day off that week to play catch up. I had called Dad that morning and we agreed that unless he was getting discharged, I’d stay home and call him again that evening to check in. I was actually waiting at the local hospital to get my blood work done when I got the call that he was being discharged. My day off turned into a day of shenanigans, but I got him home.

And then Monday, I came home from work and we went back to the ER for abdominal pain. Again. What do you know? He had some inflammation in his stomach lining, most likely an ulcer. Neat. More meds and something else to discuss with his primary doctor.

Because when you’re admitted to the hospital, you have to follow up with your doctors after you’re discharged. My dad has four doctors, which means four follow up appointments, three of which are 30-35 minutes away. And every discharge and follow up appointment and ER visit comes with new meds and med changes. In that two week period, I went to the local pharmacy four or five times.

As the month of June wrapped up, my sister’s visit drew closer. She, my brother-in-law, and my baby niece were driving up from Texas to visit family. They’d planned on staying at the house, which meant my small dwelling was about to acquire three extra people and it was barely in a fit state for the two living there. This isn’t to say that I don’t clean. I just don’t clean enough. It’s fine if you live here, but not if you’re company. Especially if you’d like to stay in this establishment and the upkeep of the rooms available hasn’t been a high priority on the To Do List.

The truth is I haven’t done much of anything with Carrie’s room since she passed aside from packing up some of the more important items and sending them to her parents. It’s still largely like she left it. Even the easiest thing -going through her clothes and donating/tossing them- has been put off. The only reason I washed her duvet is because the cat threw up on it (thanks for that motivation, Antoinette). I did end up doing some dusting and vacuuming at the end of June in the early stages of preparing for my sister’s visit, but that was about it.

The Box Room is a hopeless mess. My inability to have it ready in time for their visit was the main reason that my sister and her family ended up staying in a hotel, which turned out to be for the best. Just their daily visits of a few hours wore Dad out. Having them in the house the whole time would have exhausted him.

I did have time to catch up on some of the yard work before the visit. I mow about every week, but the trimming and the “jungle” (a cluster of plants, mostly pokeberry, at the corner of the house) had been neglected. It took me a little over an hour to get it all neatened up so the house looked less abandoned by the time everyone arrived.

Also, we have ants. We get ants every year and this year isn’t nearly as bad as previous years, except for the fact that I cannot get rid of them. Every time it looks like they’re gone, a missed crumb calls them back to the kitchen counter in full force. So, that’s been a fun, ongoing battle that I’ve been losing.

I am glad to say that my sister’s visit went well. If anyone noticed that I forgot to wipe up the crumbs by the toaster, nobody mentioned it.

It occurred to me during this particularly extra challenging period of my recent existence that I might be a little burned out. Some bad habits started to reemerge (a creeping increase of screentime, procrastinating tasks, bedtime procrastination to my detriment). The constant fatigue, tiredness, and exhaustion. The casual neglect of my needs and the default to lazy behaviors. The overwhelming feeling that I can’t keep up with anything and I’m failing at everything.

It’s not surprising that I would be burned out as I’m already terrible at functioning at an adult level and I’ve been forced to go full-throttle at it for the last nine or so months. Care giving is an adventure. Some days Dad does pretty well and some days he doesn’t. I have no idea what I’m waking up to every morning or walking into when I come home from work. And between care giving and work, there are no days off. It’s not like my dad requires constant care, but I’m on-call 24/7. I make sure he gets his meds and takes his meds, I get him to his appointments where I am his knowledge keeper and translator (he has trouble hearing). I make sure he’s eaten. I am his problem solver on the days that he doesn’t feel well (“Have you tried X, Y, and Z?”). I get a couple of hours here and there that I’m able to get out of the house and not do caregiver or work-related things.

And I haven’t even talked about the work-related things, library or creative.

I honestly don’t even feel entitled to my burnout. I feel like other people would be handling all of this much better than I have and than I am, so I don’t really deserve to be burned out. Other people would have the gutters and their dead roommate’s room cleaned out by now.

But the burnout is real for me and I’m doing my best to deal with it. Not by going easy on myself, of course. I don’t deserve that. Instead, I’m trying to make the manageable bits more manageable so they don’t become overwhelming. It requires a lot of list making and organizing things on paper because I do better when I can see the contents of my brain. Hopefully, it will eventually help.

So, why the long-winded whine?

It’s one of the immutable laws of the internet.

Complain online, and the complaint fixes itself.

Aging, But Not Gracefully Because I’m Not Graceful

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I don’t mind the idea of getting old. I’m not the kind of person who turns twenty-nine year after year. I have no trouble admitting my age because I earned every one of those years.

I admit that part of that is because I look good for my age.

In a youth-obsessed culture like ours, holding on to every shred of youngness is encouraged, in particular for women or femme-presenting folks. People start getting Botox in their twenties just to fend off the thought of a line or wrinkle. Skin treatments, facials, retinols, creams, special diets, plastic surgeries -all in the name of forever looking twenty-five.

I, personally, don’t want to look twenty-five. I don’t think I’ve ever looked twenty-five, even when I was twenty-five. When I was young, I always looked older than my age. Part of the reason I was cast as Mother Goose in my theater class’s final was because I was the only 18 year old who looked like she’d already had eight kids. The benefit to always looking older than you are is that your age eventually catches up to your face and then your face stays the same as the years continue to accumulate.

I call it Robert Stack Syndrome. The man looked the same age for 50 years. He is proof that this can be a blessing.

In my own version of this syndrome, I looked 42 forever and then I hit 42 and now I’m past 42 and people can’t believe I’m older than 42. I credit my genes for this. They provided me some insulation from being an 80s baby and also smoking for ten years. My grandma says my skin looks so good because I always drank a lot of water, even when I was a kid.

I also developed a decent skin care routine at some point in my early thirties that I think has done wonders. No, I’m not immune to that particular vanity, but I also think it’s important to take care of your skin. After all, it’s an organ covering your entire body. You should be good to it. A good cleanser, a moisturizer, and sunscreen, and you’re good to go.

Of course, my skincare regime isn’t that simple anymore. I’ve added an eye cream and a retinol and some sort of acid serum instead of exfoliating and a daily lip mask and a weekly sheet mask and dermaplaning. Okay, it sounds like a lot, but you’ll just have to trust me that I don’t have a lot of money or time invested in this routine. For me, I consider it all acts of self-care to keep my skin looking good.

Notice I said good, not young.

I want to continue to look good for my age. And I think that I do. No one’s going to card me buying tequila (just question my life choices), but even with the sparkles of silver streaking my hair, nobody’s going to be offering me up a senior discount either (I’d take it if they did, though).

However, I’ve recently been challenged with what looking good for my age means. I’ve started to develop the saggy, crepe skin underneath my chin and along my neck. You know what I’m talking about. That delicate wattle that some folks get. That I’m apparently getting.

And I’m not sure I’m okay with that.

Considering I’ve been researching ways to minimize or eliminate this development, I’d say that I’m not really that okay with it. I can handle the lines and I’ve learned to cope with a couple of the dark spots, but this? This is an old age marker I’m not ready for.

Between trying new neck tightening techniques and looking into creams that might help, I’d say that my willingness to age gracefully has its limits.

Probably because I’m actually not that graceful.