Medical Concerns

When you’re a kid and your parents make you brush your teeth, you often meet it with reluctance. Depending on your age, maybe tears. Most kids try to get out of brushing their teeth, as it just seems like a chore.

Even when Alzheimer’s disease makes almost everything unfamiliar, positive quality of life is still within reach. But it takes adaptability and flexibility around the present circumstances and challenges. Luckily, yoga is an excellent practice in flexibility: for the body, the mind, and the spirit. Whereas Alzheimer’s is a disease of disconnection, yoga is a science and practice of connection.

Stress and aging go hand-in-hand over the whole course of our lives. More than just a mental-emotional experience, a stressful situation triggers biochemical responses that kick our bodies into high gear so we can better handle that situation. However, we aren’t meant to be in this high-alert mode for long periods of time, let alone long periods of our life. While stress hormones and tension can be truly important reactions in times of real danger, when our stress response is getting triggered regularly in the context of everyday situations, those physical and chemical reactions take a toll on our health and on our ability to be resilient and cope with stress in general.

When Ruth’s husband died, she was 67. She had never been one to shy away from having a drink, but as the weeks and months went by, her family and friends seemed to notice her drinking more and more. When asked about it—always delicately—she laughed and said that she’d earned it.

At 82 years old, David was in pretty good health. He prided himself on being fit, healthy, and active, so when he began experiencing severe pain after minor knee surgery, he felt as though the things he valued most were being taken away from him.

I wish there was a natural, sure-fire way to immunize my garden against weeds, especially as I’m getting older and my back and my joints don’t hold up as well to the stooping and pulling. I can mulch the area; that helps. And I can keep up the health of my purposeful plants, so their roots and bulk discourage unwanted visitors from rooting themselves. I do these things and try new ideas that come my way because I’d much rather build the health of my garden from the ground up than try to chase away invaders after they’ve already gotten comfortable.

After my father had his stroke, I lived in rolling fear, peaking every cold and rainy spell, that he would catch pneumonia. It became almost an obsession of mine, heightened in my imagination by the cruelty of it: this strong man who took on everything in the world, being felled because his weakened immune system couldn’t fight off some bacteria.

My friend Doug lives with osteoarthritis, and it has gotten worse as he’s aged into his seventies. He says the worst part for him is not the discomfort, but the fact that he feels so limited by his arthritis and can’t do all the things he once loved to do. He looks out the kitchen window and mourns that he’s had to let the garden go because it involves too much up-and-down movement and too much work with his hands and arms. And whereas he once used to bring all of his summer vegetables into the kitchen to work into fresh recipes, even cooking has become a difficult chore.

Sandra felt paralyzed. She sat silently at the kitchen table with her head propped against one hand and replayed the events of the day in her mind, trying to make sense of them. She’d picked her aging father up at his apartment earlier in the day thinking that it was going to be a regular day full of doctors appointments, but it ended up turning into her biggest nightmare.