I am OK -- but..

I am OK.  In fact I am doing surprisingly well. This has been a great summer.  I am in good shape and healthy.  My eye is better, my knee is better.  Nothing really hurts.  I have been very active kayaking, biking and chasing my grandgirls -- only one of whom can actually walk, so it's not that hard -- but the one who can walk loves to run away.

I like hot weather, so the summer has been good to me.  We go off to the beach house and play.The kids have been coming and bringing their kids. Friends have been coming. We discuss how the world is  falling apart while sitting in great comfort.

Then I go to work and things are different.  but that is the nature of what I do.  People very rarely come to me to tell me how happy they are, or how excited they are about the interesting, creative, fulfilling things they are doing.  That happens occasionally, but that means it is the last session.

But I have been doing this for years.  I can deal with depression, even terrible depressions.  Anxiety; hey, everyone I see is anxious, also I can be helpful for loss, loneliness, confusion, stress, relationship problems, addictions, even violence. Hey, let's talk about it. My kind of therapy at least doesn't have side effects.  It won't make you constipated or gain weight.

But you know what upsets me.  Dealing with people who have chronic, physical pain.  I mean pain that has lasted years and comes from degenerative diseases.  Diseases that not only resist treatment, but that the treatments for them seem to create other painful conditions.  The drugs lead to passing out, or digestive disorders or kidney failures.  Pain raises blood pressure, the drugs for that causes dizziness, people fall down, cut themselves and go to the hospital and pick up a staph infection. The antibiotics for the staph infection cause colitis, which leads to a colostomy.  But still the pain, from the degenerating bones, or the pressure on the nerve from the back injury, or whatever it was that began the whole process goes on, and no one can really find it, and if they find it they rally can't do much about it.

Part of why it bothers me is that I am getting older, my friends are getting older and my clients are getting older.  For me, I can no longer run and jump.  For me, who played basketball for 25 years with the same group of guys it is a loss.  But I can cope.

What i know is that more is coming.  More of my friends have had knees replaced, hips and shoulders too.  They are on all kinds of meds because this or that number comes up too high. I take one little pill. Other friends have stents in their bodies, or have difficulty getting out of chairs, or even, are dead already.

So far, most of my friends and family are basically OK.

I plan to be immortal, until I am dead.