Surrender

TAUREEF MOHAMMED CHILDREN could really screw up your life, you know. I know what you thinking: it is usually the other way around: parents screw up children’s lives. But it seems to me when you get my age – 83 years old – the tables flip. The circle of life! Looking back, it was about five years ago, after the hospital admission and hip surgery, that they – all three and a half of them – take over my life. (The one living in Canada is the half. If you ask him, though, he would say he is one and a half. He so full of himself.) They come up with all kind of strategy and plan, tell me what I could do and what I can’t do. And now, five years later, I don’t know what the hell to do. When I come out of the hospital, five years ago, the first thing they target was my house. They say how the house too big, the stairs too steep, and the yard is too much maintenance. They say is time to “size down.” Now, I have to admit that when I was discharged from the hospital, I was shuffling around with a walker, and every step feel like a mile. So, the house did feel 100 times bigger, and the stairs ten times taller. So, I surrender to them without thinking twice, and I sell the house. But the irony now, five years later, is all of them singing in my ears how I not walking enough, how I not doing enough physical activity, and how I need to get back active. They don’t realise that at 83 years old it not easy to come up with new ways to do things, and new routines. What they want me to do, join a gym, for the first time in my life, at 83? Anyway, that is the short story of how I lose my house – and my exercise routine. The next thing I give up, on the recommendation of my three and a half children, was my car. It also happen not too long after the hip surgery. Right after the surgery, it look like I had some confusion and could not tell day from night – as though it easy to tell day from night in a hospital. When it was time to be discharged, the doctor say to hold off on driving until the follow-up visit. I listen to his instructions, and in the follow-up visit he give me the all-clear to start back driving. The next day I misjudge a distance and get in a small accident. Well, my children went back to the drawing board, and start to strategise again. In the end, it was decided that it wasn’t safe for me to drive and the best thing was for me to sell my car. It was three and a half against one – if their father was still around they would have never move so large and in-charge around me – so I conceded, and I tell them to put up the car for sale. They said not to worry, how they would do all the errands, and take me wherever I needed to go. After a while, my eldest take it further, and say how she would bring the groceries home for me – it look like I was keeping her back in the grocery. Eventually, I decided I don’t want to be an inconvenience to anybody, so I stopped asking anybody to go anywhere. Again, the irony is, five years later, they singing a song in my ears that I only like to stay at home and do nothing. So now, five years after losing my house and car, I in a doctor’s office in a memory clinic, hearing the same songs, and supposedly losing my memory. I want to tell the doctor all that is on my mind – to prove to him that my memory is perfectly fine – but the eldest and youngest here with me, and the doctor look like he on their side. If he glance at me, I lucky. So I just sit and listen to the doctor and his echoes. “Your blood pressure is a bit high.” “You hear what the doctor say, your blood pressure is high.” “The best thing for the arthritis is exercise.” “You listening to the doctor? You have to exercise more.” So, I listen, patiently waiting for this attack to be over, knowing that it would only stop when I surrender. Taureef Mohammed is a physician from TT working in Canada E-mail: taureef_im@hotmail.com The post Surrender appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.