Of feet and eyebrows: the drip of aging

A few months ago, a Stanford study came out that said humans experience two big “bursts” of aging: 44 and 60. Like everyone on the cusp of 60, it set off an internal sputter for me — what can I do that I’m not already doing? I’m already pretty active and fit? What the hell is a “burst” of aging?

I’m not gonna lie, as the kids say — that study was probably one of the things that impelled me to join a bourgeois (mostly white, very middle class, mostly older lady) tennis club as my next gym, mostly because it’s close by, not bro-y, clean, not loud and — did I mention — close by, with free parking? It’s definitely a different vibe for me — any gym that teaches both mahjong and line dancing sure seems like a gateway to a retirement community, doesn’t it?

Anyway, antics with the Magic Age and Fitness Measuring machine in my initial fitness assessment aside (more about that later, no doubt), the gym is serving its purpose. I go with some regularity, lift things, stretch. Go to yoga, went to a line dance class (more about the Canadian Stomp also later). Allowed myself to be talked into a few sessions with a personal trainer, who made me feel good by telling me I control my breathing better than any of his other clients. (My sister finds this hilarious — “was ‘you know how to breathe‘ the only nice thing he could say?”).

So with the trainer, I’ve started lifting heavy things again. Before Covid, I lifted heavy things — two weeks before the first lockdown, on my 55th birthday, I deadlifted 200lbs, I frequently brag! — but I got out of the habit. And yes, I accept that for healthy aging, I need to start lifting heavy things again. So I push the sled, playing Chappell Roan in my earbuds, momentarily deluding myself I’m still part of queer pop culture.

So yes, there are some aging type things we can push against. Literally in the case of that damned sled, which is my nemesis. But some things just … happen to us.

About a year ago, I lay down to do some infernal figure fours after a sweaty session on my spin bike. For some nebulous reason to do with the kind of world we live in now, I took a selfie and sent it to someone. Then I looked more closely. My face looked weird. What was wrong? Then it dawned. Where the fuck were my eyebrows?

Gradually, mysteriously, my eyebrows had just … fled. Menopause? Post-covid alopecia? Just Plain Age? Who knows. No one had warned me.

And I looked again. What the hell was happening to my eyeLIDS? Both my mother and my grandfather had to get surgery for ptosis when they were in their 70s — but my eyelids are already drooping. Like, sometimes I have to manually adjust them because the folds get stuck.

Well, I hied myself off to an eyebrow maker post-haste and paid her an unfathomable amount of money to tattoo me up some fake brows. And I consulted a plastic surgeon about what I assumed was ptosis.

“Hm,” he said, his fancy, privately funded office shiny around me, before and after boob jobs flashing onto the tv behind him. “This isn’t classic ptosis. This is just age. And it’s not really your eyelids — your eyes are drooping because your forehead is drooping. I would actually recommend a forehead tuck — this is what you actually want.” He pulled back the skin on my temples showing me that indeed, it’s my whole face that is drooping.

I thanked him and the nice receptionist who gave me the list of fees (both cheaper and more expensive than you think), warning me that the prices would only be valid for three months.

I am pretty sure I am not the kind of person who gets a facelift. But I also assumed I’d have my eyebrows forever. Who can tell what I might do in the future?

So that was my face. Then, for my 59th birthday, I did a trek in Patagonia I’d been longing to do forever — the four day W trek. I carried my own pack over incredible terrain, about 29 km a day, most of it up and down — but stayed in huts where they also fed us. It was incredibly hard and amazing and once in a lifetime — and, at the end of the third day, where my feet were screaming in pain because of an endless rocky downhill, I realized that my big toenails were loose. Like baby teeth.

I ended up bagging the final part of my Patagonia trip, spending a day in a hotel in Santiago trying to soak my feet in the bathroom sink without bashing my head open.

When I got home, I had to get my big toenails surgically removed. They have grown back (remarkably!) But my feet are… bigger. My well worn in blundstones don’t fit. I need all new winter shoes. Did anyone mention that with aging, your toenails might grow back, but your feet will stay…expanded? And then last week, after three days on my feet facilitating a group in a comfortable pair of fluevog boots, I suddenly developed, for the first time in my life, plantar fasciitis. And I’m hobbling around. Sigh.

The notion of “aging in a burst” sounds like it’s the time when you suddenly might experience a massive heart attack, early onset dementia, the need for a hip replacement. But I’m finding it’s a steady drip. Small indignities that form a pattern. On one side of the coin, I’m this hale and hearty person climbing Patagonian mountains, riding my bike across Poland by myself, pushing a heavy sled in the gym. And on the other side of the coin, I’m a saggy-faced, metabolically challenged, no-eyebrows, splaying-feet person with chronic insomnia and a prescription for HRT I guard with my hot-flashing life.

Bodies are gonna body. Aging is gonna happen. I am still going to have adventures, build my strength and stamina and flexibility and try to ease my sleep and fascia. But what new, unforeseen indignity will show up next? I’m betting it has something to do with hemmorhoids.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who is planning to be in a nunnery in Bhutan on their 60th birthday.