Why Do Men Have Nipples? (18 page)

This is not an uncommon belief, but it is not possible to swallow your tongue. The tongue
can
block the opening of the airway and one of the first things that you are taught in basic life support is that if someone is having difficulty breathing, you should tilt his or her head and lift the chin. This helps to remove the tongue as an obstruction. If you do come upon someone who is having a seizure, just make sure that he is safe and won’t hurt himself. Do not put a bacteria-covered spoon in the mouth. Call for help and before you know it, the seizure will probably stop on its own.

CHAPTER 9

GETTING OLDER

I can’t
believe it’s not over yet. I feel as though this evening has taken years off my life. Leyner and Jeremy have been separated, and there are only a few stragglers left picking at the remnants of Eloise’s glorious buffet.

Even Leyner seems beaten down from a combination of toxic tequila, amorous adventures, and verbal violence. He is leaning on the credenza and says to me as he agonizingly stretches his neck, “I used to be able to drink, womanize, and brawl and come out of it all as fresh as a daisy. Now I feel limp and shriveled like a rotting clump of stinkweed.”

Leyner stands and arches his back uncomfortably. “Did I mention my prostate feels a little swollen?”

With that, I turn and exit the party.

There are many advantages to getting older—early bird specials, senior citizen discounts, the fact that people don’t ask you to help move a sofa up a flight of stairs, and getting away with saying whatever the hell pops into your head. But there are some perplexing changes ahead for all of us. . . .

5:33
P.M.

Gberg:
Maestro.

Leyner:
Hey you . . . give me five minutes (at most) . . . go get something . . . then we’ll work.

Gberg:
Surely.

5:45
P.M.

Leyner:
You there?

Gberg:
Yes, sir.

Leyner:
What should we do?

5:50
P.M.

Gberg:
Light this piece of shit on fire and go drink ourselves silly.

Leyner:
Brilliant idea.

Gberg:
Or we can talk about the health alert that I just received about mycobacterium bovis in U.S.-born children.

Leyner:
What the hell is that?

Gberg:
You are so filled with all of this medical knowledge, I was hoping you could fill me in.

Gberg:
I am waiting.

Leyner:
What is it? Some mushroom thing, some fungal thing?

Leyner:
Some fungal cow thing.

Gberg:
You are getting warm with the cow.

Gberg:
Sounds perverse.

Gberg:
Give up?

Leyner:
I give up.

Gberg:
Similar to TB (mycobacterium tuberculosis).

5:55
P.M.

Leyner:
Duh . . . should have known that.

Gberg:
Infection that you can get from the milk of infected cattle.

Gberg:
Unpasteurized cheese and stuff.

Leyner:
People should just drink cow’s blood . . . like the Masai . . . that would solve the problem of mycobacterium and lactose intolerance.

Gberg:
You should run the Department of Health.

Leyner:
Thank you.

Gberg:
And Homeland Security.

Leyner:
Homeland Senility.

Gberg:
We have to finish this book first.

IS IT TRUE THAT YOU LOSE TASTEBUDS
AS YOU GET OLDER?

You finally have time and money to relax, travel, and have a good meal. The bad news is you probably can barely taste this meal.

Starting at age forty-five, tastebuds begin to lose much of their sensitivity. Older people often lose their ability to sense bitter or salty flavors altogether. You start your life with about nine thousand tastebuds and in old age you have less than half of that.

You want some more bad news? Aging also causes decreased hearing, sight, smell, and touch.

WHY DOES HAIR TURN GRAY?

All the hairs on our head contain pigment cells that contain melanin. Pigment cells in our hair follicles gradually die as we age. The decrease in melanin causes the hair to become a more transparent color like gray, silver, or white.

Premature gray hair is hereditary, but it has also been associated with smoking and vitamin deficiencies. Early onset of gray hair (from birth to puberty) can be associated with medical syndromes including dyslexia.

A more interesting question is why old ladies insist on trying to cover up their gray hair with bright blue hair dye.

WHY DO YOU SHRINK AS YOU GET OLDER?

Some of us don’t have a lot of inches to lose. In height, that is.

Unfortunately, we all will get a little shorter as we age. This takes place over many years, and ultimately we all lose an inch or so. Gravity is responsible for some of this height loss. You lose muscle and fat as you age and gravity weighs down especially on the bones in your spine and may cause compression. This explains why all those senior drivers in Florida can barely see over the dashboard.

WHY DO OLD LADIES GROW BEARDS?

The easy answer would be to work in a carnival, but it is actually not that simple.

At menopause, the ratio of male hormones, or androgens, to estrogen begins to change. This can produce mild increases in facial hair. The amount or thickness of facial hair is hereditary and how thickly hair follicles are distributed throughout the skin is determined at birth. Some ethnic groups or nationalities are more likely to develop facial hair than others.

Some medical conditions can cause excessive hair growth, so it is always wise to check with your doctor especially if you are a woman experiencing five o’clock shadow.

DO YOUR EARS CONTINUE TO GROW AFTER
THE REST OF YOUR BODY STOPS GROWING?

Prince Charles may worry about this very question.

There are definitely some changes in the face that occur with aging. First some facial muscle tone is lost, causing that saggy look. Then you get the dreaded double chin. The nose can also lengthen a bit, and the skin on the face becomes thin, dry, and wrinkled. Then there are longer, thicker eyebrows and gray hair. We haven’t even mentioned droopy eyes, receding gums, missing teeth, and last but not least—bigger ears. Yes, your ears do continue to grow as you age, but only slightly. This is probably due to cartilage growth.

What a list of wonderful things to look forward to as we enter our golden years.

WHY DO YOU NEED LESS SLEEP WHEN YOU
GET OLDER?

Actually, you do not need less sleep as you get older.

The body’s sleep requirements remain constant throughout our lives. The average total sleep time, however, actually increases slightly after age sixty-five. This sounds like something to be excited about, but not really. The problem is that as you age, you have more difficulty falling asleep. Sleep for the elderly is also interrupted by such factors as leg cramps, sleep apnea, and medical or psychiatric illness.

Normal sleep consists of two major states: REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and NREM (non-REM) sleep. NREM sleep is divided further into four sleep stages. A healthy night’s rest is generally comprised of 20 percent REM and 80 percent NREM. As you age, this distribution is changed.

WHAT’S UP WITH THE EAR HAIR?

You lose the hair where you want it, and gain it in all those other unsightly places. Bushy eyebrows, excessive nasal hair, and hairy ears certainly don’t make you anxious to get older, do they?

Sometimes the excessive growth of hair on the ears is genetic and is linked to the Y chromosome, the sex chromosome found only in males, which explains why you don’t see many hairy-eared females, except in
The Lord of the Rings
movies.

And what would this excess hair growth be without a competition? The
Guinness Book of World Records
record for the longest ear hair was broken again in 2002. A seventy-year-old from Tamil Nadu state in India, Anthony Victor, broke the record with his ear hair measuring 11.5 centimeters.

DO YOUR NAILS OR HAIR GROW AFTER
YOU DIE?

Human nails and hair do not grow after death. The fact of the matter is that after you die, your body starts to dry out, creating the illusion that your hair and nails are still growing as the rest of you shrivels up.

WHAT ARE AGE SPOTS?

Age spots are also known as sunspots or lentigines. They are flat, brown discolorations of the skin that usually occur on the back of the hands, neck, and face of people older than forty years of age.

Age spots are caused by an increased number of pigment-producing cells in the skin. As our skin becomes thinner with age, it also becomes more translucent, which makes these spots more obvious. Age spots are caused by the skin being exposed to the sun over many years and are a sign of sun damage. They are not harmful and do not represent skin cancer.

IS LIFE SPAN DETERMINED STRICTLY BY
GENETICS?

How we age as individuals is a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors. There have been many studies that try to assess how much of our longevity is determined by our genes. Scientists have known for several years that people who live the longest often have children who also have long life spans. The life spans of adoptees seem to be more closely correlated to those of their birth parents than to those of their adoptive parents. One study of twins reared apart suggests about a 30 percent role for heredity in life span, but others say the influence is even smaller. Recent research seems to indicate that the process of aging and life span may be determined by your mother’s X chromosome. Incessant maternal nagging, however, could reverse any beneficial genetics.

Leyner:
I spoke to my grandmother last night . . . but she thought I was her son, my uncle.

Leyner:
So I had the conversation with her as my uncle.

Gberg:
Deceptive but useful.

Leyner:
It was simpler than disabusing her of the mistaken identity.

Gberg:
How old is she now?

Leyner:
96.

Leyner:
I’m going to be 49 on Tuesday.

Gberg:
I can’t imagine you as a 96-year-old.

Leyner:
Feels like I’m teetering on the precipice of something major.

11:40
A.M.

Gberg:
What, the publication of this masterpiece?

Gberg:
Do you have plans for Tuesday?

Leyner:
Yes! We should start writing Nobel acceptance speeches now. I just booked a ticket for Stockholm on Travelocity. This book will do for us what “The Little Red Book” did for Mao.

Leyner:
Speaking of not going gently into that good night . . . Mao is my model for groovy aging.

Gberg:
That’s the first time I’ve heard Mao and groovy in the same sentence.

Leyner:
Smoked five packs a day . . . never brushed his teeth (just rinsed with green tea) . . . AND cavorted every night with three or four young Red Guard hoochie girls.

Gberg:
I never knew he was such a player. He probably would have loved to party with Kim Jong-il.

11:45
A.M.

Leyner:
Mao got more action in a week than Kim Jong-il will have in a lifetime.

Gberg:
Those were the days, my friend.

Leyner:
Our next book should be “The Sex Lives of Asian Despots.”

Gberg:
We need a catchy title, like . . .

Gberg:
. . . “Despots and Sexpots.”

Leyner:
That’s pretty good—maybe we should just call this book “Despots and Sexpots.”

CAN TAKING VITAMIN C HELP YOU LIVE
LONGER?

Dr. Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel Prize winner, took high doses of vitamin C for almost forty years and died at the ripe old age of ninety-three. He believed that his life was prolonged for twenty years because of his high vitamin C intake. Sounds great, and Pauling certainly makes a valid argument but unfortunately there isn’t any strong evidence to support this claim.

Vitamin C and vitamin E, often referred to as antioxidant vitamins, have been suggested to prevent cell damage in humans, thereby lowering the risk of certain chronic diseases including high blood pressure, stroke, and asthma. Many studies have tried to prove this, but with no obvious results.

Very few side effects exist with vitamin C, so there is no major downside to adding a vitamin C supplement to your daily regimen, though occasional reports of nausea, heartburn, gas, or diarrhea are noted with higher doses. A more prudent approach is to eat a balanced diet including fruits and vegetables and avoid dangerous activities like smoking.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS MALE
MENOPAUSE?

The concept of male menopause and the need for hormone replacement therapy as a treatment is a highly controversial topic. The many names that are used to describe these changes in an aging male include andropause, viropause, male climacteric, ADAM (Androgen Decline in the Aging Male) syndrome, Aging Male Syndrome (AMS), or late-onset hypogonadism. Some wives prefer to call it a midlife crisis. Even though we don’t like to admit it, they may be right.