The Blood, Sweat and Tears of Anti-Aging
To celebrate yesterday's launch of my book, COUNTERCLOCKWISE: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-Aging, I offer this little excerpt...in hopes of leaving you wanting more.I know I’ve crossed the line when I call my husband, all excited, and practically yell into the phone, “I’m getting a muscle biopsy!” Yes, this is good news. Very good news. A respiratory physiologist I’ve been sweet-talking has just agreed to do the biopsy, which means I can discover the state of my mitochondria. Almost as important, it means I have a potentially entertaining way of writing about one of the geekier subjects in this book (the aforementioned mitochondria) – because after all, who doesn’t want to hear about a muscle biopsy?The line I’ve crossed is what I will do (to myself) to turn back the clock and, incidentally, to get a story. Having my face computer-aged to seventy-five and subjecting my fragile ego to viewing the result? Harrowing. But sure, okay. Intense pulse laser treatments? A little painful, but no problem. Breathing into a mouthpiece connected to a plastic hose connected to a computer while cycling full-speed as a good-natured but inexperienced grad student draws my blood every three minutes? That’s close to the line. But a biopsy? A procedure defined as “the medical removal of tissue from a living subject”? I’m looking at that line in my rear view mirror. ....The next morning, bright-eyed and empty-stomached, I present myself at Hans Dreyer’s lab. It’s in a medical research building attached to a major hospital, and it looks, feels and smells like a hospital: band-aide-colored walls, fluorescent panel ceiling lights, the whoosh of central air conditioning. I feel my blood pressure rise. I hate hospitals. As I wait for Dreyer to gather what he needs for “the procedure,” I have time to think about just how much I hate hospitals, and just how much time older people spend in them. One of my goals in life – and certainly a long-term goal in this counterclockwise journey – is to spend as little time in them as possible as I get older. I’m all about that “rectangularization of morbidity” thing: healthy, healthy, healthy, dead. That’s the way to do it. ....I am directed to lie down on a hospital bed and roll up my sweat pants to expose my left thigh. I crane my neck to watch Dreyer prep the site, draping, swabbing, etc. as if, well, as if something major is going to happen. All the while I am asking mitochondria questions, scribbling notes in my reporter’s notebook held overhead using one of those pens NASA developed that can write upside down.“This will feel like a bee sting,” Dreyer says, holding aloft a Lidocaine-filled syringe. He injects carefully. “Followed by a little burning,” he adds. Unnecessarily.