Author: MaryG

Flu Fail

~ MaryG ~ Leave a comment

For several years now, I have been getting a flu “shot” in the fall and it seems to be working. I haven’t had the flu, or even a bad winter cold, for years. I’m a believer. I love vaccines! But here’s the thing: I haven’t actually been getting a flu SHOT. I’ve been getting a flu MIST. It’s this nice, gentle, needle-free spray in each nostril. They give you a tissue afterwards. You go home. You don’t get the flu.

Last year, when I was 49, I knew it was going to be my last easy mist. You see, they only give the mist to people who are UNDER 50. I don’t know why. It seems like a silly rule. And I’ve been thinking about how to get around it for a whole year.

When flu clinic day arrived at my local library, I had a brilliant idea. I’d lie. So simple! I’d just write the wrong birth year on the form. If they asked for ID (highly unlikely), I’d say I left my license in a different purse. I can stay 49 as long as I want! My husband approved of my plan. (He said he had an aunt who had stayed 29 for years.)

Unfortunately, I never got to try my plan at the clinic because they were not giving the mist to anyone over 18 that day. They said it was in short supply. (Saving the good stuff for the kids I guess.) But I didn’t give up. I went to the pharmacy at Target and asked if they had the mist. “Plenty of mist,” they said. Yay! I filled out a form (listing my birth year as 1966, instead of 1965) and gave it to the pharmacist with my insurance card. He told me to go shop and then come back and they’d have my mist ready for me.

I felt uneasy about the lie while I was shopping. Unlike the health clinic at the library, Target has computers. Would they figure out I was over 49? I had never been to that pharmacy before. Maybe it wouldn’t come up…

When I got back to the pharmacy, the pharmacist asked me to confirm my date of birth. I lied again…verbally this time, which felt worse than accidentally-on-purpose lying on paper. Then the pharmacy technician piped in, “well, your insurance keeps coming up 1965.” I caved immediately. “Alright” I said, “I was born in 1965. I’m 50. I lied because I want the mist, not the shot.” The pharmacist was very sympathetic and even tried to think of a way around the rule for me, but there was no way around it. It was a shot or nothing.

I opted for nothing. Lame, I know. But I wanted the MIST goddammit. And I’m only 50.

It starts with the glasses.

~ MaryG ~ 3 Comments

8/26/23: Somehow my very first blog post (from November 2015) got “unpublished” and turned back into a draft, so I’m re-publishing it now, 8 years later. UPDATE: my eyes are worse and those millennials are 40.

I remember exactly when it happened. It was four years ago. I had just turned 46 and I was trying to figure out how to use the new digital camera I got for my birthday. I was staring at the tiny little buttons and settings for quite a while. Then I looked up, took the picture, and when I looked back down at my camera, the little settings were blurry. WTF! Just a second ago, they were perfectly clear and now I couldn’t see them at all. I ran inside and sat down. I immediately thought “brain tumor,” but I decided to have some cold water, just in case it was dehydration. Miraculously, when I picked up the camera again, the small settings were clear.

After that, I occasionally had trouble reading tiny print. Having been blessed with perfect 20/20 vision my entire life, this became the first undeniable sign of middle-agedness. Sure enough, the eye doctor confirmed that this type of thing is part of the normal aging process and comfortingly reassured me that “it only gets worse.”

In the beginning, I embraced the fashionable aspect of reading glasses. They come in so many cool colors and designer styles! I bought way more glasses than I actually needed and wore them jauntily atop my head whenever I wasn’t using them. Now, at 50, I just keep a pair in as many rooms and pocketbooks as possible, because it’s a real pain in the neck to run around looking for glasses every time you want to read something smaller than a STOP sign.

But here’s the thing…if you find yourself without a pair, say in a dimly-lit restaurant, or at church choir practice, someone almost always offers you theirs! “Here you go, borrow mine” someone will say, and takes the glasses right off their own face and hands them to you. You see, you’re never alone in the 50+ club. We might not be as skinny and sexy as those 30-year olds at the next table, but we know something that they don’t fully understand yet: Nobody escapes…time marches on for everyone. So when you take those sparkly Target-brand readers from your friend’s ever-so-slightly wrinkled hand, give her the wink that says “thanks and yeah, I know, it’s happening to us too.” I’ve got you old friend.