Arthritis. The word means inflamed joints. The most common type of arthritis is osteoarthritis. It’s usually caused by wear and tear on the cartilage‚ the part of the joint that provides a cushion between the ends of the bones. When you lose that cushion you’ve got bone rubbing against bone. If you’ve got arthritis, no wonder you feel stiff and your joints hurt and you can’t move like you used to.
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Laurie Hadlock was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2009. She doesn’t have much of a tremor, which is one of the classic symptoms, but she does have lots of coordination problems. There are so many things Laurie loved doing that are nearly impossible now, like dancing and skiing. She also loves to exercise and recently discovered Rock Steady Boxing, a high-intensity exercise program based on training used by boxing pros and adapted for people with Parkinson’s.
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Not too long ago a friend of mine was diagnosed with mononucleosis (mono). When I hear that someone has mono, I think teenager. My friend may be so in spirit, but in reality, she is a grandmother.
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September was a hard month for my family because we lost my mother. She left behind a passel of grievers. Me and my seven brothers and sisters, 15 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. We all still need comforting and also to comfort each other.
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My mother, who had just turned 90, passed away recently of a condition called aortic stenosis. During a routine checkup about 10 years ago, her doctor picked up a heart murmur. After a series of tests, including an ultrasound, a heart specialist made the diagnosis. I’d never heard of aortic stenosis before, but learned that it’s yet another thing we can develop with age. It happens in about three percent of people over 75. Anatomy of the heart To help explain what it is, I’ll begin with a brief anatomy lesson. There are four valves in the heart — aortic, tricuspid, pulmonary and mitral. Their job is to see that blood flows into your heart from your lungs and then flows out of your heart to the rest of the body. It’s important that it moves in only one direction. The aortic valve allows the blood to flow out of the
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My mother had a couple of choking episodes recently. I wasn’t alarmed because she’s had swallowing issues in the past. At least twice over the years, she had a procedure that stretched her esophagus because of a stricture or narrowing.
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More tired than usual? Losing hair? Feeling low? Irritable? Shedding pounds when you’re not even trying? Or dieting like crazy and the scale won’t budge? These are all symptoms of thyroid disease.
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Thyroid trouble? As we age, the risk of our thyroid not working properly increases. I know, yet another thing. The thyroid gland is a butterfly-shaped organ in the neck, just above your collar bone and below your voice box. If you’re a man, it’s not your Adam’s apple, it’s just below it. The thyroid’s job is to produce hormones that regulate how the body uses and stores energy. It can be under- or overactive. It can develop lumps or nodules. Or it could become cancerous.
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The other day a friend asked me about gout. Someone she knew was recently diagnosed and she was curious about what caused it. “Isn’t that a disease of kings?” she asked me. Well, gout did plague at least one famous king — Henry VIII.
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Scott Anderson was only 60 when he had a stroke in early 2013. “I was cutting a banana,” he told me when we spoke on the phone recently. “All of a sudden something happened. I tried to say to my wife, ‘I think something’s wrong,’ but I couldn’t say it right.” His wife called 911 and not long after, Scott was in the local emergency room. He spent a week in the Intensive Care Unit. “I couldn’t talk,” he says. “I couldn’t do anything. I was a mess. It took nine months of speech therapy before I could talk well.”
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