So yesterday I had the privilege of a nuclear bone scan. A bit like an MRI, or “going through the tunnel” as my Mom would say. Thank God it did not have the accompanying clacking noise that comes with an MRI. Strapped onto a trolley, with this big white space-age machine closing in on you to literally a centimetre from your nose, staying there while you can feel yourself breathing against the metal. I had to haul out all my meditation techniques to not go into a panic and hyperventilate.
The whole procedure took forever without much information imparted. Reading all the warning signs, I had to ask the technician what it is that she is injecting into my veins that will be absorbed in my bones. “Isotopes,” she said. “Oh, isotopes!” I thought. Nice. I wonder what chemical reactions need to take place in my body that will make those little buggers go right into my skeletal system…
As a friend mentioned yesterday – the minute you are stripped of your clothes and in a hospital gown, your keys, wallet and cellphone (hopefully) safely locked away, you lose all agency. You are now a number on a le. They will tell you as little as possible, be as courteous s possible, and talk just softly enough to each other whilst scanning your body to make you think “OH MY GOD I WONDER WHAT THEY ARE SEEING AND DISCUSSING AND WHAT HAVE THEY FOUND AND MY LIFE IS OFFICIALLY OVER AND AND AND!”.
And after hours of lying there, spasmed up to your eyeballs having been strapped to an icy cold metal trolley trying to not scream “Get me out of here!!”, they calmly say “Thank you, Mr. Stroebel, you may go now”. Like not a word of information. “We will send the report to your doctor”. Goodbye. Totsiens. And I want to scream “NO! This is MY body, you tell ME what you found, and I will tell my doctor IF I FEEL LIKE SHARING IT WITH HIM!” Nope. Go home, worry yourself stupid for a few days, and the doctor will phone you when he has time. Eventually…(he did and all is clear. I am not going to die of isotope poisoning or anything else anytime soon as far as they know.
Now imagine living with memory loss or confusion, being much older and frail, and being told that you have to go for a brain scan. (We know that a brain scan can detect atrophy, but then again most older brains have atrophy.) Is there really sense in putting someone through this hectic ordeal? I have my serious doubts…
What I try to bring across (and tried doing yesterday in my post about “old age homes”) is that we need to seriously re-think what we consider as “normal”, to rede ne how we see and thank about ageing in particular. My friend and mentor Carol Ende say that she hopes in the not-so-distant future the current “frail care” of the world will be museums of antiquity, where we will take our children to see how older people were housed in the past. Much like visiting the Castle of Good Hope or the cell of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. And our children will not believe what they see…
But for now, that is what we have and what we do. We somehow have created a new “normal”. Put old people in a hospital-like institution. It is good for them. We cannot look after them in the community and it is not safe for them. And they adapt. They even tell us that they are happy. In spite of the fact that all evidence point to the contrary, and the clinical outcomes show that it is not conducive to any measure of healthy ageing, we still do it. And yes, that is why we desperately NEED all the culture change movements we can get. It still does not mean that what we do is right!! We spend enormous amounts of money, time and effort to change something which is fundamentally and fatally awed. Yes, we make a difference, but we need to start looking at better alternatives. For us.
Again, just ask yourself the simple question: “Is that how I would like to be?” Unless you can shout a resounding NO, we need to rethink the system. It will start to change only we can start facing our own mortality, start talking about it, and connect with a different discourse on the future we wish for ourselves, creating a new “normal”.
We must take ageing (and dementia) out of the biomedical closet. Give it a voice. Autonomy. See it, hear it. Photograph it, write about it in a different context, and see ourselves, all of us, on our way there…