The Downside of Fitness

 

Comedian/actor Red Foxx once said, “Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.” If it were only so easy. I’ve written in a previous post about my dad. He is now pushing 97 and has been lying in bed for over a year, not dying of nothing but trying to die and failing to find the door out of this mortal probation.

Genetically speaking, he shouldn’t be here. His father died at age 85, his mother at age 80. He came from a large family—ten children. One sister died before reaching her first birthday. His older brother, Amos, was murdered in California during World War II at age 25, his body left in Death Valley to decompose. The army was too busy prosecuting a war to investigate his death, so my grandfather traveled from southern Utah to California to try to find out what had happened to his son. After talking to some soldiers from Amos’s outfit, he came away convinced that Amos’s commanding officer had taken him out into the desert and put a bullet in his brain, likely over a girl. A local kid out hunting jackrabbits found his skeleton several months later. The army had just labeled him AWOL. My dad was number eight of his parents’ ten children. He is the only one left. Of his remaining seven siblings, six of them died of natural causes (old age), none of them reaching age 88. His oldest sister died in her mid-fifties of kidney disease. So how can we explain his 96-plus years?

Maybe it’s just the luck of the draw, but my own belief is that he is still here because he kept himself in such good shape. He was, hands down, the hardest worker I have ever known. At age 94, he was still taking care of a large, labor-intensive yard—and we couldn’t keep him out of his neighbors’ yards. He couldn’t sit still. He was always out and about, raking people’s leaves, pruning their trees, cleaning snow off their driveways, or fixing their sprinkling systems. When he was 75, he came down to help me move a couple of dump truck loads of topsoil from the street into my backyard. By the time I got home from work, he had moved a whole truckload by himself. When he was 81, he and his best friend, who was only 73, came down and took a large tree out of my yard, because they “knew how” and had the equipment. He golfed regularly until he was 88. Even when his balance got bad and he had fallen a few times, he was still putting in a few miles each day on the stationary bike in the basement. Toward the end of his independence, I joked with him that he drove better than he walked, and it was true. We never had to take the car keys away.

He didn’t just breeze through his later years, though. He had four heart procedures, the first when he was 79. He had a heart attack while he was out on the golf course with my oldest son. He didn’t want to worry Matt, so he just crouched down to catch his breath whenever Matt was hitting. He made it through the round, and they weren’t using a golf cart; they walked the whole course. He then drove 80 miles home to Ogden and went to the hospital the next day, where they put three stents in his coronary arteries. A few years later he had bypass surgery on a Thursday in January. The next Monday he was discharged and was walking around the house, frustrated because it had snowed and the neighbors were cleaning the snow off his driveway. They owed him, but it still drove him crazy. Two more times he had blockages that required angioplasty, so it’s not like he was without health issues. But he worked so hard he kept himself in great shape.

My mom had had poor health since I was young. She told me when I was a teenager that she wouldn’t make it to 60. She finally succumbed to pulmonary hypertension in 2013, just short of 84, and my dad wore himself out taking care of her. I was worried for a while that he would die first—from exhaustion. He would lie awake at night, listening to his sweetheart breathe, wondering at times if a particular labored breath would be her last. But he survived her, and he recovered after she died, and kept on working. He found great satisfaction in serving his neighbors, and he lived for the little kids in the neighborhood. They would come and visit him because he would give them ice cream treats.

His memory started going in his nineties, but he was still able to take care of himself, his big yard, and his neighbors. In the end, it was his legs that failed him. When he was 94, he started losing his balance. He fell several times over the winter. Once he landed face first on the pavement and needed stitches in his forehead. Another time, he fell in the house, hit his back on the corner of a wall, and cracked a vertebra. This really slowed him down, but by his 95th birthday, in April of 2020, the pain was pretty much gone. His birthday fell on general conference Sunday, and we were there to celebrate. During the final session, a neighbor called to make sure he was home. They said they had something planned for his birthday. Because of the pandemic, we couldn’t have anyone in the house, so they set up a chair for him on his front lawn, and the entire ward drove by in decorated cars, with balloons and signs. I was amazed. The line of cars seemed to never end. There must have been 70 drive past, with families hanging out the windows yelling birthday greetings to their favorite nonagenarian neighbor.

The last day of May, he was out on his back driveway with a cane in one hand and a leaf blower in the other. There had been a big wind, and he was trying to blow the twigs off his driveway. His yard was filled with scrub oak, which can get pretty messy after a wind. From what he told me later, there was a branch that was too big for the leaf blower, so he bent down to pick it up. When he stood up straight, he lost his balance and fell over backward. He landed hard and broke his left hip. We had told him “No more yardwork,” but we knew he wouldn’t mind. His back driveway is somewhat secluded, so he lay there for 40 minutes in agony. Finally, a neighbor heard him yelling and found him lying on the cement. He called the paramedics, and they came and took Dad to the hospital. He never went home again.

Dad’s best friend, who lived across the street, called me, and I drove up to Ogden and found Dad in the emergency room. Because he was otherwise in such good health, the doctors advised us it would be best to do surgery to relieve the pain. So they put a metal rod inside his femur and held it in place with a couple of large screws. He spent a month in rehab, and he worked hard to regain his mobility, but although he could move around a bit with a walker, there was no way he could live alone. His memory was also getting very bad. He insisted, though, that he didn’t want to be a burden on anyone, so I brought him to Provo and placed him in an assisted living facility that I drove past every weekday on my way to work. This was difficult, though; I couldn’t visit him because of the pandemic. I could call him on the phone, and we could visit with him through a door at the end of one of the hallways, but his hearing was also getting bad, so our visits were not ideal.

He worked hard to improve his mobility for a couple of months, determined to become well enough to go home again, and for a while I thought he might succeed. The facility was on lockdown, so he was confined to his room. He would do “laps” in the room, pushing the walker back and forth, doing sets of twenty several times a day. But sciatic pain set in, and he ended up in a wheelchair. Unfortunately, at his age, once you lose mobility, it just doesn’t come back.

On Thanksgiving night 2020, he was trying to move from the bed to the wheelchair and didn’t have the wheels locked. It rolled away, and he fell again, this time breaking his right hip. I again met him in the emergency room, and because he was still in such good shape, the doctors again convinced us that surgery would be best to relieve his intense pain. They performed a partial hip replacement, and again he went to rehab. After a couple of days, he started going downhill fast. They did some tests and discovered that he was experiencing kidney failure, which often happens in the elderly after a physical trauma.

Because he was now expected to die within a few days, they let me in to see him. He was still somewhat responsive. I told him that he was in kidney failure and that they didn’t expect him to live long. He said, “That’s the best news I’ve had in a long time.” He was ready to go after my mom died, but he was just too healthy. Now he thought he was going to get his wish.

I had a decision to make, though, and I’m glad I made the right one. Since he was no longer doing rehab, Medicare wouldn’t pay for him to stay at the rehab center. They would charge $500 a day to care for him until he died, which we assumed would happen quite soon. Or we could transfer him back to the assisted living facility, where they said they could also care for him until he died. My sister and I discussed this and decided to transfer him. We felt it would be more like home to have him back in his room with his furniture and the other few belongings I had brought from his house. Besides, he was already paying rent for that room.

By the time we had made this decision and transferred him, on December 4, he was almost completely unresponsive. His body was shutting down fast. He could neither speak nor eat, and he was basically just skin and bones. I expected him to go soon, so we planned his funeral. But he somehow kept hanging on. One day, his hospice nurse called me and said that when she came into his room that morning, he looked up at her and said, “Well, hi there.” That was a surprise.

From that day, he started to recover. He started talking a little and eating apple sauce, yogurt, and other soft foods. They did a blood test and discovered that his kidneys had somehow started working again. He kept getting stronger, started eating solid food, and actually put on more weight than he has ever carried in his life (due to three meals a day and no exercise). But he has not left his bed for over a year now, except for one day when one of the CNAs and I tried to move him five feet from the bed to his recliner. We found it was like trying to move a big bag of bowling balls. He had no strength in his legs to support his weight.

Since he was considered to be dying when he was transferred back to assisted living, they allowed me to make “end of life” visits, even though the pandemic still had the facility on lockdown. When he revived, they never stopped me from coming, so I have visited him almost every day since last December 4. I generally shave him, help him with breakfast, and help him brush his teeth. I also read a page to him from, first, his own short personal history and, next, from my mom’s (which is 80 pages long). I do this to try to help him remember his long life. We are now to page 78.

My dad’s quality of life is near zero. His memory is pretty much gone. On normal days, he has some idea of where he is (Provo), and he knows who I am. He will also remember a few of his old friends and neighbors. On days like today, he does not recognize me or know his own name. On his worst days, he hallucinates. He sees things that aren’t there and imagines crazy scenarios that are pure products of dementia. His hearing is not good, and his eyesight is compromised by macular degeneration, so he cannot read or see the TV very well. He just lies in bed and mostly sleeps now. But his body won’t stop. In his more lucid moments, he just wants to go and be with his wife. On bad days, he says she doesn’t want him; that’s why he can’t die. But that is definitely not true, and I tell him so. Some time ago, on a day when he was very lucid, he requested that we take him off any medication that would prolong his life. We did this, but it has not made any noticeable difference.

I wonder at times if there is a grand timetable for each of us that determines when we depart this mortal existence. If so, I wonder why my dad’s time has not come. Why, for instance, did his oldest grandchild die of cancer at age 8, but he can’t die at age 96? The only positive from his lingering is that I have been able to visit him every day, but that is certainly a mixed blessing. If there is no such timetable, and nothing more than a host of random factors determines our day of departure, I still wonder how on earth he is still here. He had his ticket out of here more than a year ago, but he somehow misplaced it. Based on his family history and his personal history of heart problems, there is no way he should have outlived all of his immediate family by more than eight years. As I said before, my only explanation is that he worked so hard he kept himself in prime physical shape. Now he’s paying the price of fitness.

And it makes me wonder about my own future. Anything could happen, of course, but I’ve started wondering about my own life twenty or thirty years from now. I don’t want to end up like my dad, but I’m 65, and I run up stairs (I’m impatient) and still play basketball three mornings a week with guys 10, 20, 30, and even 40 years younger than I am and can still hold my own. I had a scare a couple of years ago. I’d had borderline high cholesterol for years, but the numbers jumped up, so I went and had a coronary calcium scan. It showed significant plaque buildup in my coronary arteries. I visited a cardiologist, and he told me I was a good candidate for a heart attack within the next ten years. He said if I could drop my LDL from over 140 to 70, the plaque buildup would not just stop but reverse. So I changed my diet, started taking Lipitor, and lost ten pounds without starving myself (I wasn’t overweight anyway). My LDL dropped to 75, then 72, and recently to 65. My triglycerides were very high but have dropped like my LDL.

I’m hoping to avoid the heart problems my dad experienced, but I don’t want to end up like he is, lying in bed and, my apologies to Redd Foxx, not “dying of nothing.” I’ve joked that if I reach 90, I will start eating ice cream for every meal. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.