I began this website as kind of a way to look at the funny things about getting older…forgetting basically every name I ever knew, not to mention song titles, movie actors and more. Now I watch ‘Jeopardy’ and instead of beating the contestants to the answers, I go, ‘Oh, right, I know this…’ but of course can’t come up with it.

Then something really scary happened to me a few months back. As the proud owner of three cardiac stents, I went for a routine nuclear stress test (talk about your oxymorons!). I was confident. “I feel great, no problems here,” I thought to myself. “I’m gonna kill it.” It turned out it almost killed me!!

As I’m walking on the treadmill, with the incline growing higher and the speed increasing, the operator says, ‘Can you go 30 more seconds?’ I go, ‘piece of cake’ – ‘cause I really wanted a piece of cake — and I kick it into high gear. Suddenly, though, the operator stops the test, injects something into my arm and the cardiologist comes in and says he’s calling an ambulance to take me to the hospital. “What? Why?,” I asked. Something about ventricular tachycardia. I had to look it up too.

He showed me the EKG from the test. Imagine if you gave a 3-year-old a crayon and told the kid to just draw anything. That was my EKG.

Now, after three days in the hospital, I am the proud owner of FOUR stents and a defibrillator/pacemaker combo package. Two for one…such a deal!

And also now, the medical people have my attention.

You see, for me, one of the things that makes you feel old is when you can’t eat that piece of chocolate cake anymore, or the bacon cheeseburger deluxe with French fries AND onion rings! Or that greasy pizza with pepperoni. You never see old people eating this stuff (at least not the smart ones!) They eat fish, and vegetables and drink water. To steal the punchline from an old joke: “and such small portions!”

Another is when you finally drop all the weight they tell you to, and people now look at you and gasp, and whisper out of earshot (which is now about an inch and a half), “Is he sick?” I yell, “WHAT???”

Yet worst of all is when family and friends stop letting you do anything. “Put down those folding chairs; I’ll have the kids carry them downstairs.” Or, “leave the suitcase. I’ll put it in the overhead bin for you.” Or, “Am I walking too fast for you?”

A doctor friend of mine called this being a “cardiac cripple.”

For me, I feared that giving in to their way of thinking would make me feel old. The hardest part of all this has been the mental, not the physical. I never had pain, never felt bad. But you naturally start to question yourself. Am I no longer the vibrant guy I was? Do people look at me differently now, as somehow being more frail? Can I still do most of what I used to do?

I’m here to tell you the answer to the last question above is YES! My doctor said I could return to 75 percent of what I did before until I healed up and rested up more. (Did someone just tell me to rest??  Did you hear that, dear? My doctor said I have to REST!!  And no more snow shoveling!! Be careful out there!)

As for getting back to what I did before, some quick math revealed that 75 percent of lying on the couch is STILL lying on the couch! I felt better already!

So I’ll skip the burger meals, cut down on sugars and carbs, but I WON’T start eating dinner at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I put on a button-down shirt, tie and blazer to take a walk in the mail! A white belt?? Kill me now!!

We ARE, after all, getting older. But we don’t have to give in to it. You’re as young as you feel. While physically the age thing is starting to be a pain – well, more than one — I take solace in knowing that mentally, I’m still the same stupid 12-year-old I’ve always been!

<Fart sound here>