A Good Enough Daughter
As a professional in the field of aging, Sara had seen it all—until her own mother broke her hip at the age of 88 and became profoundly confused, unable to live in her own home. Join Sara on her journey through the strangeness that is dementia while trying to make sense of it all and finding humor in the details. [Editor's note: Sara no longer contributes to Silver Planet, but we have made her archived blog entries available as a service to our readers.]
What’s Up with Life Extension?
We spend billions trying to “reverse” aging
I watched Oprah this afternoon, and she and Dr. Oz featured strategies, techniques, and equipment to extend life. I understand wanting to live a healthier, happier, more meaningful life, but living to 125 or 150, just for the sake of living long, doesn’t make sense to me.
Americans spend billions of dollars yearly trying to “reverse” the aging process. Hormones, nutritional supplements, and vitamins seem to be the mainstay of anti-aging efforts, but outlandish rituals, risky surgeries, and extraordinarily expensive machinery now appear on the “rejuvenation” menu as well.
Today on Oprah, a woman was featured while reclining in a six-foot-long glass-enclosed machine. The purpose of the machine was to “push” oxygen into the body, thereby oxygenating parts of the body that might need more oxygen, like the brain for example. For the life of me, as my mother would say, I could not help but think of Michael Jackson. I bet he had one of those machines—probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My friend Karen is into bio-identical hormones; or rather, she would like to be into bio-identical hormones, except that she can’t find a doctor who will prescribe them (if they need prescribing, that is). I keep asking, what’s the point?
Clearly, I do not understand the drive to live a really long life. What is wrong with living life to the fullest for as long as possible? I just can’t shake the belief that all this reverse aging stuff is just a buffer to deal the fear of dying and death.
By Sara Myers
A Good Enough Daughter Blog
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