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Dear Body,
First of all, thank you for your service. You've done a solid job acting as my lifelong home and existential headquarters.
Second, please accept my apologies. All too often, I could have - and should have - treated you better, more as a temple than merely a factory and warehouse.
My bad.
Perhaps it's time for me to take inventory. Some medical experts recommend that every adult conduct an occasional self-examination. Call it an audit or report card. The intent is to catalogue your strengths and weaknesses from head to toe, track changes and observe the needs going unmet.
"Doing a regular performance review of your body has a lot of potential benefits," says Paul O'Rourke, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a practicing primary care physician. "Evidence shows that a self-inventory can be especially valuable if you have any chronic conditions. Otherwise you might miss some slight swelling in your legs or brush off your persistent headaches and other symptoms."
"The first step before you take inventory of your body is to decide that you care about living a long, healthy life," says Deborah M. Kado, a professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and co-director of the Stanford Longevity Center. "But it's worth taking this inventory only if you're going to do something about it. Your attitude is important. You have to be saying to yourself, ‘I'm going to look aging in the eye because I want the truth about what's going on with my body.'"
This, of course, doesn't replace going to the doctor for an annual physical.
"A self-body inventory should be done in addition to [a] regular check with a medical professional," Kado says. "A routine physical exam, involving blood, urine and other screening tests, may yield clues to conditions, such as early liver disease or worsening kidney function, that would otherwise go undetected."
As for you, dear Body, congratulations are long overdue. You've soldiered through 72 years to keep me functioning. Just look at all the good you've done me. Thanks to you, I can still see, hear, smell, taste and touch. I can still breathe, eat, sleep, walk and even occasionally think.
What a trip! You've ushered me through birth, puberty and procreation that gave me and my wife a son and a daughter. More recently, you've seen me through becoming a grandfather - twice. I hereby salute you.
You have also braved malfunctions, injuries and insults. They've included childhood asthma, hangovers in college, twisted ankles, pulled calf muscles, hair loss in my late 20s, disappearing teeth in my 50s and an arthritic knee in my 60s to a collapsed lung from a knife wound during a mugging, detached retinas, two hernias, borderline high cholesterol and blood pressure, bouts with bronchitis, surgery on my nose for skin cancer, a catheter ablation procedure for atrial flutter and, most recently, cataracts. You're also an inch shorter now.
Hey, nobody's perfect.
• Let's get physical
Body, let's first talk about how you look, shall we? The bags under your eyes might as well be termed luggage. The once-adorable curls on your scalp are almost all gone, replaced by air, and they now sprout, freshly relocated, in your ears and nose. Your pecs are surrendering, if gradually and grudgingly, to gravity.
If only that were all. The skin along your forearms and thighs appears, in a certain unforgiving light, decidedly reminiscent of Boris Karloff in "The Mummy." Your neck sags with wattles more becoming on a turkey. Oh, yeah, and you also slump, slouch and stoop. So feel free to call yourself post-cute. No wonder you now prefer poorly lit mirrors.
Now let's talk function, but focus only on things that repeatedly go on the fritz.
Take your neck. Please. Hear that crackling sound? That's your neck, stiff and sore if swiveled too soon after you sit staring at a computer screen for hours on end. You've considered getting a new neck implanted, but if the procedure calls for first removing your head, you will pass.
Your back is likewise a victim of abuse, your spinal disks compressed most likely from too much rigid sitting. One time, after driving a car over a long distance, you suffered spasms that left you crawling on the floor just to get to another room.
Your hips are evidently rather a mess, too. More than once they refused adamantly to cooperate in the act of walking. A physical therapist once told you that you had the tightest hips he had ever seen. You wanted to take it as a compliment but knew better.
But, so far, your successes have vastly outnumbered your failures. You still feel frisky, so much so that, as poet Walt Whitman proclaimed, you sing the body electric. Luckily, because you always played sports, you long ago established the habit of trying to keep yourself in decent working order.
As a result, your strength, stamina and flexibility are respectable. You can still crank out 25 Marine-style push-ups and, more practically, carry around your 17-pound infant grandson for as long as 15 minutes without whimpering. You have also, against all odds, never broken a bone.
You have also taught me some important anatomy lessons, chiefly to pay attention to your cues, listen to your warnings and certainly never take you for granted. You're always speaking to me, one day whispering, the next screaming, and I disregard your running commentary at my peril.
• How to conduct your bodily inventory
The tangible benefits of physical self-inventory are amply demonstrated. At best it can lead to early detection of health problems. Taking charge can also better inform your health-care decisions, equip you to communicate in more detail with your doctor - resulting in more accurate diagnoses and more targeted treatment - and ultimately improve your well-being.
O'Rourke recommends scanning your body at least once a week. "Take the time to focus on how you feel from head to toe," he says. "Go down a checklist. Observe how you're breathing and walking, how you're digesting your food, and whether you have any pains."
But O'Rourke also warns that anyone suffering from anxiety either in general or about health issues in particular could suffer worse anxiety from performing a self-assessment. He advises discussing what and how to go about monitoring your health with your physician to promote the best outcome.
Says Kado of Stanford, "Yoga can serve as a model. Say hello to yourself and pay attention to how you're feeling. Go through a sequence from your feet, legs and midsection to your arms, shoulders and face. Ask yourself, ‘How's my posture, my flexibility, my mobility?' "
The last word here goes to Aristotle, who said, "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." That advice applies as much to the body as to the heart, mind and soul.
Accordingly, dear Body, I'd like to renew our unwritten contract to partner from cradle to grave. For now, just as you've always done right by me, I pledge to keep trying to do right by you.
Best,
Bob
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