In the fog-bank, gray-zone once again this early Thursday on California’s north coast — gloomy prelude, however, to an expected  bright, sunshine-filled afternoon.
Unless something goes terribly wrong…

How about what’s normal, but wrong — like getting old? This month will mark two years since my retirement, and aging seemingly is an unfair piece of shit. Apparently, the human body breaks down way-quicker than for the original assembling. Yet we keep living…
Last April, a new study showed Americans are indeed staying alive longer, but consumed by bad health.
Creating a life’s situation where death ain’t the worse part.

The painful irony of knowledge…

(Illustration: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity),‘ found here).

This bit of health-related tomfoolery was piqued sharply by a piece yesterday at LiveScience about some research on aging and bad/or worse medical shit — key note:

For patients facing serious illnesses, dying isn’t necessarily the thing they dread the most — according to a new survey, a majority of patients consider bowel and urinary incontinence and having to rely on a breathing machine to be fates worse than death.

And the grit of the survey says:

They found that more than half of the patients considered bowel and bladder incontinence and relying on a breathing machine to live to be health states worse than death.
In addition, more than half of the patients considered being unable to get out of bed, being confused all the time, having to rely on a feeding tube to live, and needing care all the time to be either worse than, or the same as, death.
The state that the majority of the patients ranked as “much better than death” was being in a wheelchair, the researchers found. Less than 5 percent of the patients ranked being in a wheelchair as a condition worse than death, according to the study.
More than three-quarters of the patients ranked being at home all day and being in moderate pain all the time as either much better than death, somewhat better than death, and a little better than death.
And more than 50 percent of the patients considered living in a nursing home to be better than death, while the remaining patients thought it was the same or worse than death, the researchers found.
When patients in the hospital are facing serious illnesses, they are often at a high risk for ending up in many of the health states that the researchers included in the survey.
But many hospitals assume “implicitly or explicitly that death is an outcome to be avoided no matter what the alternatives are,” the researchers wrote.

Old age is verily the golden years, though, the amber quality projected might actually be just urine…