I fell in love with the T.S. Eliot poem “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” way back as a high school student for the poem’s imagery and rhythm. Who can resist the image of fog as a cat rubbing its back on windowpanes? I treasure the poem even more these days for its expressions of aging.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
For most of us in the 80-year old crowd, rolling our trousers (or more likely rehemming them) is a sign of the vertebral compression which daily brings us closer to the ground. Eating peaches is joyful, messy, and a quick alternative to the digestive inaction brought about by multiple medications. Digestion action might be what Prufrock feared. Today, the phrase which resonates with me is
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
This is the evening of my life, with infinite numbers of medical providers hovering over my patient’s body spread upon their examining and operating tables. My Electronic Medical Record lists my providers: in addition to Primary Care (PCP), Nurse Practitioner (NP) there is the cardiologist, the gastroenterologist, the pulmonologist, the dermatologist, the orthopedist, the endocrinologist, the podiatrist, the gynecologist, the ophthalmologist and more. This crowd of white coats wouldn’t even fit into a single operating room!
Each of these providers literally sees a different me, each from their own perspective, sort of like the old fable about the blind wise men asked to describe a camel, in which one describes the tail, one the head, etc. The point of this fable, like that of my medical providers, is that each individual sage/trained eye just cannot see the whole picture. It would take all of their reports and insights and many more to reveal me, with all of my experiences, personality quirks, strengths and weaknesses. Sadly, their presence and voluminous reports encourage me to segment my body and—as they do—to think of each system as its own independent entity. Thus a simple bellyache can generate hours of puzzling. Is this bellyache the result of a food item, akin to Prufrock’s peach? Or a gynecological cramping problem? Or an endocrine problem, such as pancreatitis? Does it matter?
Perhaps rather than ruminating on the myriad of possible medical causes for my bellyache, I should simply sip a cup of hot, fragrant peach tea while listening to music and sitting in the sunshine.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
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