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Celebrating My Milestone Birthday With an MRI By Jason DeRusha
When I turned 40, I had a party with 150 people at a local brewery. I celebrated my 50th with an MRI. My first MRI to be exact. Diagnosis: I'm getting older. Like most men, I spent my 20s, 30s and 40s blissfully avoiding the doctor. Of those the Cleveland Clinic got to actually admit it, 55% of men said they don't get regular health screenings. Why do men avoid the doctor? We don't like bad news, we think if we avoid things they'll go away, we don't want to step on the scale and be told that we need to eat less and drink less. Maybe I'm channeling my own reasons on that last point.
Like ground pork sliding into a casing, I was strapped in and slid into the magnetic resonance imaging machine (sorry for the Midwest sausage reference.) It was loud, I listened to Hits One on satellite radio to pass the time. Then the waiting! Did I tear my rotator cuff? Is there arthritis? God forbid a tumor? Then the follow-up appointment with the answer for the shoulder pain: inflammation. Inflammation? "Doc, is this just because I'm getting older?" I asked the orthopedic doctor. "Well, probably," he replied. THAT'S IT? Is this what life is going to be now? Unexplained pain, annoying, persistent, unsolvable? I got a steroid injection in each shoulder and then a prescription for a couple weeks of physical therapy. Come to think of it, I have to take a break and do the exercises that make my wife laugh at me.
Why do men avoid the doctor? We don't like bad news, we think if we avoid things they'll go away, we haven't been conditioned to make regular doctors' appointments like women do.
I decided it was time to make a change. Maybe part of it is seeing my formerly healthy father- in-law start the long goodbye due to Alzheimer’s disease. Maybe it's because my shoulder has been hurting me for a year, and it wasn't getting better. Maybe I'm just growing up. I'm not sure when things changed that you can't just go to your doctor to have your pain looked at, but I needed to see one doctor for my upper arm pain and a different doctor for the lower back pain.
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20
MAY 2025
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