Sensitive Issues #1: Age

I think I've known this would happen one day, that I may have just been waiting for the shoe to drop. When it did, I was not prepared for how sensitive I could be on the subject of age.

The physician who does the epidural injections that have made life bearable of late is a young man, not even the age of my son, and his assistant is a young, very pretty RN. They are both very pleasant, chatty people, and while I am lying on the table in the surgery they are polite enough to include me in their conversation. I think the continual patter is a sort of diversion, so that the patient doesn't over-anticipate the moment the needle and nerve meet.

On this past visit, the doctor happened to glance at my file and see my address. "Do you REALLY live on Penny Lane?" he asked, and when I said I did, he sang the opening bars of the Beatles tune by that name. I laughed and said that yes, we lived there alongside the barber and his customers . . . I went on to say that this had always been one of my favorite Beatles songs and that I liked it much better than some other of the music of that time. When he asked if I also liked Elvis, I answered that I did, but he had become a star much earlier than the Beatles. In fact, I was in elementary school when he began recording his biggest hits. The Beatles did not come to this country until the next decade, in the 60s. There was a moment of stunned silence before he asked, "You lived THEN?"

I was really, really happy that I was lying on my stomach with my face half-buried in a pillow, because I could feel the red spreading up my neck and across my face. "Yes," I hesitantly said.

You would have thought Indiana Jones had just made a new archaeological discovery. He was so excited! Then I remembered that I was trusting my spine to this young man with sharp needles and steroids, so I thought I should just answer his questions and speak very slowly and distinctly, let him get on with his work.

I told him about seeing Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show that famous evening. We were all crowded around our little TV in the den, and we never saw his hips, although we could hear the screaming from the audience and suspected that something was up. He asked about things like Woodstock, drugs, protest movements--things that were not at all a part of my rather sheltered life at that time. I had to explain to him that my mother would have sliced and diced me if she thought I had the least hippie leanings. He was a little surprised that not every teenager one was a hippie. Of course, history isn't interested in the plain, every-day folks, but in the flamboyant ones who give spice to an Era. How true-to-life was "Mad Men?" And on and on.

I have another appointment with him at the end of this month. I wonder if I should dye my hair, have a face lift . . . Imagine what it must be like for him to have such an object of antiquity for a patient!