Yes, John Travolta is getting older but apparently he could still bust a few moves earlier this year at a music festival in Italy. Travolta’s 70 so even if he’s in the best of shape, too much reprising of his iconic disco dancing in Saturday Night Fever might result in chronic disc problems for him now.
The expression “Old age is not for sissies,” is attributed to Bette Davis but we don’t know if she actually said it. However, she had a line in All About Eve that was a definitive description of what getting old is like even if she didn’t write it— "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."
I’m not morbid about mortality but I was struck by finding out recently that life expectancy in the United States has not recovered fully from the drop we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. That drop in in 2021 was a full year of lost longevity to 77.8 and the most recent update I could find from the Centers for Disease Control put American life expectancy at 77.5.
There are dates in one’s life that are memorable and some are celebrated annually— birthdays, anniversaries —and there are others we experience only once. I’m about to have one of those or at least I certainly hope so. In September I will be 77.5 years old.
If life was a basketball game, I’d say I’m nearing the end of the fourth quarter. Reaching 80 will be overtime.
And over time American life expectancy has steadily and significantly increased. At the outbreak of the Civil War you could expect to live to be 40. By World War I life expectancy had increased by 15 years to age 55. In 1960 when John F. Kennedy became president it had risen by another 15 years to 70 and in 2020 average life expectancy at birth in the United States had reached 78.8 before experiencing the pandemic relapse.
Modern medicine and other learned and implemented health measures have had everything to do with it. When I was in my twenties I had a severe case of strep throat. I likely would not have survived it if I'd lived a century earlier. Who knows what other illnesses I could have contracted if I hadn't had my childhood vaccines.
I have every reason to believe that the prescription drugs I take now are helping to prolong my life including one for an indolent lymphoma that I was diagnosed with seven years ago.
But there's been an added bonus for baby boomers like myself. Have you noticed in movies made even as late as the 1950s that people who were playing characters in their 50s then looked like many of us do in our 70s today? What’s responsible? Nutrition, exercise, cosmetic surgery? Do we care?
Living longer yet looking younger than those who barely made it to our age in the not so distant past just seems totally logical in the upside down world I frequently feel like I'm living in.
Some of us can be described as workout and diet fanatics with memberships at the Y, yoga and Pilates classes and Weight Watchers but most of us now have a different prescription for the pathway to a longer life— many of them!
We belong to a nation of prescription drug users. Nearly half us are taking at least one. Over four billion prescriptions for drugs are now filled annually in America. For a substantial number of us our medications give us an improved life if not a lifeline itself.
That's the message in our bottles and we hear about it incessantly. You can always tell the demographic of an audience watching television by the commercials. I worked for ABC News and our viewers were old. If I had really paid attention to the advertisements for pharmaceuticals that took up a substantial portion of any newscast, I would be a walking encyclopedia of the side effects from hundreds of them.
I truly believe that in the future when anthropologists study our period of time on earth they won’t be as interested in our politics or our wars as much as they will be in our commercials. Over the course of human history slander and killing will seem old hat. But commercials! They will tell the tale of how we lived and how we were different.
I can envision it. There’s one researcher centuries from now staring at at a commercial playing on a primitive gizmo called a television and saying to another, “What the hell do you think that was? Did they really shoot salad with it?"
The United States is one of only two countries in the world where drug makers can market directly to their consumers. I doubt many of you will guess the other one so I'll give you a hint. It's not on a continent. It has significantly more sheep than citizens and it battened down its hatches and dealt pretty successfully with the coronavirus. It is not Taiwan although that country did an excellent job staunching COVID too.
By the way the price paid for prescription drugs in New Zealand as well as in many other countries is less than one half of what we pay in the United States. Some of you may be aware and grateful, like I am, that the passage of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act put a cap this year on out of pocket costs for prescription drugs for those of us on Medicare. That has undoubtedly been nothing less than life saving for the life savings of so many.
I’m not a visionary but I’d wager there is somebody out there who is and sees that prescription drugs have become such a normal part of our lives as we get older that unexploited marketing opportunities for pharmaceutical companies getting together with real estate developers are there to be… well, pillaged.
There are plenty of retirement communities that are already centered around things like golf and tennis, the arts and continuing education. Could it be that in the future seniors might flock to Club Meds where you can live alongside others with whom you share the same medications?
And just think if you're self conscious about the number or type of pills you pop, you'd be able to literally swallow them and your pride together with someone else.
I have a few specific names for these residences I've come up with that might work…
I am on 7 prescription drugs daily, plus my "baby aspirin".
Also getting Keytruda infusions once every 3 weeks to as a defense against bladder cancer reoccurrence; you may have seen Keytruda advertised on TV.
The drug ads on TV drive me crazy. Should not be allowed.
The life expectancy dip is somewhat misleading IMHO because of Covid. Most of us will NOT die from Covid, so I think it distorts the picture for the rest of us. We have had one contemporary die from Covid.
I hope your "game of life" goes to triple overtime as long as you are enjoying the competition. Judi's parents certainly did.
keep up the good work