When I was 17, I remember sitting in the eye doctor’s office waiting room and filling out one of those forms. When I got to the section that asked me to check off the diseases in my family history, I checked off almost all of them. It was then and there that I decided to become a vegetarian, hoping to head off diseases that might come my way as I got older and that seemed to be my birthright.
That was the early ‘90s, and being a vegetarian back then was not as easy. Vegetarian food then was kind of bland because most people weren’t doing it. It was a diet practiced by hippies and tree huggers who hung out in health food stores. We didn’t have the array of soy, almond, cashew, and coconut milks that are available in just about every grocery store now. Back then, I experimented with watering down non-dairy liquid coffee creamer to use in place of milk. Blech! Oh my god, it sucked.
Also, my mom was no help at all. Every time I announced I was going vegetarian, she’d pull out the crockpot and make her mouth-watering barbecue pork ribs. Every. Damn. Time. I knew she was trying to break me.
At high school, vegetarian options were few and far between. I settled for eating a chicken burger every day for lunch because back then, vegetarian meant you just didn’t eat red meat. White meat was okay, strangely enough. How else were you going to get your protein?
When I went off to college, things got easier. College was conducive to being weird. When I went to Holland for a semester, I got a Dutch boyfriend who was also (amazingly) a vegetarian and had a harder time of it than me because the Dutch diet is practically meat-based. “Meat with a side of meat,” my fellow students and I used to joke. My boyfriend gave me some pointers on what to eat and even cooked me some amazing meals that I still think about to this day. (Pasta primavera that I swear came from a refrigerator that only had eggs, ketchup, and margarine.)
It was also after our breakup that I went back to eating meat for about three years—I think to psychologically distance myself from him. But one day, as I was struggling to chew and swallow a piece of steak, I’d decided I’d had enough. Back to vegetarian land I went, and I haven’t looked back since, nor do I have any desire to. Yes, I miss meat, but I can now get plant-based substitutes that hit all the marks that a satisfying meat dish used to do for me.
For years, I got shit from people for being a vegetarian. Some people were just ignorant: “Where to you get your protein?” Others, like my best friend-turned-frenemy, teased me about putting bacon on every vegetarian dish I ate. But when I remarked about how healthy I was, that seemed to shut them up.
But I can’t use my vegetarianism to shut them up anymore.
Recently, my doctor diagnosed me with prehypertension. That’s not a death sentence, yet, but it is a warning that hypertension and all the diseases that come with it—heart disease, liver disease, stroke—are now on my horizon. The next step for me will be hypertension and there’s no turning back once you’ve got it.
It was quite a blow to my ego when I got the diagnosis. All my years of avoiding meat now seemed for naught. What good did it do me? But most of all, this wasn’t supposed to happen to me.
I decided to get back into running after giving it up in college because I couldn’t gain weight. During the past summer, I started running a regular route of four miles, from my apartment in Bay Ridge to the Verrazano Bridge and back. And it took me months before I could run the whole thing without stopping.
I loved the way I felt after each run and uploading my stats to Facebook off of the MapMyRun app. Friends chimed in with their encouragement, and it really kept me going. I wasn’t concerned about beating my best times. The most important thing was to just get out there and look back on a month to see how many runs I did.
An added benefit to my runs of one to three times a week before work was that I could now enjoy foods like pasta and not have to worry about it making my gut so fat. My tummy was getting flatter. Such a relief. I’ve struggled with my gut ever since my metabolism hit a brick wall when I turned 35.
The only downside to running after age 40 is that I now suffer with “runner’s face” where you inexplicably lose the fat in your face. (Some say it’s a myth. I’m the proof.) I now look 10 years older in pictures, which bums me out a bit. But it’s not enough to keep me from the high I now need like a crack addict. Also, running is amazing therapy. There are times when I’ve been upset and a run has really cleared my head.
But with all of the running, I couldn’t get my blood pressure (bp) in the healthy range of below 120/80. Everyone in my family has low bp, but no matter what I did, one of the numbers would be higher than it was supposed to be. There were days when I’d check the machine in the morning and see that the numbers were in the healthy range, but those days were rare.
My doctor had wanted to find out how I was doing in February of 2016 before putting me on medication, but when I kept presenting a higher-than-normal bp, she decided to put me on a low dose of medication for the bp and my cholesterol.
I really felt like a failure. How could this have happened?
When my doctor asked me if I was stressed, I replied, “Of course! I live in New York.” But I think my real culprit might be my love of sugar and salt. It’s nothing for me to watch a movie and drink a 2-liter bottle of Coke and eat half a bag of cheese puffs. My god, I love my junk food! A professor in college coined the term, “junk food vegetarian.” It fits me to a T. There are days when I’m sitting at work and trying to resist the urge to go buy a cupcake from the bakery counter on the corner of the block. It’s a war of wills, and I almost always lose.
But one thing I noticed about being me is that because I’m not overweight and otherwise look healthy, everyone believes I am. When I first presented high bp at my dentist’s office in the summer of 2013, the assistant asked me if I had recently gotten over a cold. At the time, it was true. But then every other time I had higher numbers, the people checking me seemed incredulous. Are you sick? Are you stressed? Do you have a headache? It was like there had to be a reason for it other than a medical problem or genetics. Everyone seemed to be in denial.
Hitting my 40s seemed to mark the end of the warranty on my body. Older friends joked that it was all downhill from here. Everyone was coming out of the medicine cabinet to reveal the meds they were on and what for: high cholesterol, bp, Xanax to sleep at night. Who knew we were all pill poppers?
And it’s not just my blood pressure. This year I’ve had some scary heart palpitations that last for hours, especially when I go to bed. These began before the running and the running actually seems to help them. My doctor put me through EKG, echocardiogram, and a halter gizmo that basically looked like a cassette Walkman but instead of ear buds, had patches that were stuck to strategic parts of my body for 24 hours. She even had me tested for thyroid. Nothing came back. My next stop will be to see a cardiologist to get a definitive answer to what’s going on. Seriously, please pray for me. Send me positive vibes. Whatever.
But my list of system failures didn’t stop there. My eye doctor told me last year that my eyes were in great shape and that the retinas were healthy. This year, he informed me that the retinas are starting to show thinning patches. This is normal and will happen to everyone at some point. But I just didn’t think it would happen until at least my 50s.
Oh! And don’t get me started on male pattern baldness! To my horror, the full head of hair I thought was my birthright (both grandfathers had full heads of hair) is now starting to turn into a noticeable patch at the crown of my head. And, no, I won’t be taking Propecia because the side effects of that shit can be prostate cancer. I worked with a guy in the early ‘90s at a summer job who suffered through prostate cancer treatment. (Look away now if you’re a guy or squeamish or both.) He described how the doctor stuck a rod down the piss hole of his erect penis. No fucking thanks! I don’t want to run the risk of damaging that too!
My system is starting to shit the bed, as my dad would say. Thanks, 40s! I finally feel comfortable in my own skin mentally, only to be falling apart physically.
The best I can do is take better care of myself. I’m thinking about switching to the DASH diet for high blood pressure and mixing it up with the Mediterranean diet. I need to wean myself from the junk food. Too bad there isn’t a patch for Coke and cheese puffs!
While I don’t like the idea of being chained to drugs for the rest of my life (even though I wear corrective lenses and needed acne medication until my body chemistry changed and I finally graduated from puberty at 35!), I do want to live to be 107. One hundred for bragging rights and seven because it’s my lucky number. (And my worst fear is that something awesome will happen the day after I die!)
It’s all part of getting older. But, man, I thought I could kick some of these things down the road to a much later date. (Gray hair at 35, too! Now I dye!) It’s so unfair.
