When you hit 65, by all accounts you should just be dead. It’s the way it used to be. It’s the way humanity began. But back then, living in caves, eating raw dinosaurs, you’d probably only make 38. Not that anyone could actually count that high ‘back in the day’. Biblically it became ‘four score and ten’, raising life expectations to 70. Unless you got crucified. Eaten by a whale. Floated down the river as a baby. Or slain by Babylonians.

But now at 65 you’re barely entering middle-age. It’s a fact. Because in the old days they held old people together with blu-tack and sellotape and performed medicine with a carpenter’s tool box. And nowadays its a bit more slick. And efficient. All ‘key-hole’ and genetic re-modelling.

I had a blood test. To check my thyroxin levels. Which were absolutely fine. But…

But. There were 47 other things wrong with me, according to my blood. Mainly, my cholesterol level was… the same as it was last year! And the year before! And for over a decade before that!!! The same. Holy fuck, is that serious? It hasn’t changed. Ah, but you have, because you’re now 65, thus the algorithms change and your risk changes, therefore you’re going on statins. Ok, I can do another pill.

But your PSA is raised! Oh. That’s the ‘marker’ for prostate problems. And for ‘problems’ read ‘cancer’. Yet not quite because there is no easy way to test or scan for prostate cancer, otherwise the number one killer of men would have us all undergoing it every year. PSAs are like Spurs buying a new player. It may be a massively great thing, but probably not. But if your PSA is high, they have ‘protocols’. Testing. Don’t ask. And that’s the least of it. Scans, bladder tests, more blood tests. Over the last 3 months I’ve pissed more into little plastic pots than into toilets. And finally, having a ‘biopsy’ of my prostate. And I don’t have cancer. I do have ‘atypical cells’, which are (apparently) different from ‘abnormal cells’, but I can live with that. I hope.

So now I’ve got that shit out of the way, I can have my new shoulder. It’s waiting for me, they’re polishing the titanium right now and I asked them just to copy Roger Federer’s.

Having spent the first 65 years never going to hospital, I’m now thinking of moving in permanently to save on fares.

Happy HEALTHY Wednesday

A xxxx