People I love are circling the drain.

I counted in my head.

More than one. More than four. And I’ve lost about that many, already just in the past few years.

That’s what I was thinking as I lay under heated blankets awaiting a procedure that might tell me if I, too, would be circling the drain, sooner rather than later.

Aren’t we all circling the drain at this age, though, I thought, darkly, as I lay there.

Seems like much of the conversation among friends my age is about how strange this phase of life is and how fast it got here. Even those circling the drain say they don’t emotionally feel their age, even as their bodies desiccate and deteriorate.

Seeing is not always believing

Ok, this may seem strange: None of us expected this, even though we watched parents and grandparents get here before us. But aging never felt real until all of a sudden it was, and for me it happened at just over 70. In fact, the morning of my 70th I wondered, had it really been an entire decade since a small group of girlfriends and I went to the wine country to celebrate my 60th? Yes, it had.

But on that narrow, warm gurney-bed on rollers, I felt confident that my results would be fine because three months of other testing had showed nothing bad, like the big C.

Then my doctor came in, short, dark-haired, devastatingly handsome and impossibly personable.

Yikes!

“Well, your imaging last summer didn’t show any evidence of malignancy but since your biliary and pancreatic ducts were slightly enlarged, we want to take a look and make sure there’s no small tumor that the MRI and CT didn’t pick up,” he told me. I felt that lurch of apprehension I always get in my gut when I fear bad news. And my gut is what he was going to peer into. I’d thought we were past the possibility of the C word. It was a surprise to hear maybe not.

After he left to get ready to peer into my gut, I pulled myself together. We’re all going to die, I reminded myself. And I do believe consciousness resides outside the body and goes on after the bodies dies. So look on the bright side, I told myself. At the very least, the next step will be interesting.

We’re all going to die. Now that’s a concept that we all know, at least intellectually, but don’t really grasp until it’s in view. Hopefully distant view.

When it’s in sight

But then I considered my loved ones for whom that’s looming larger and larger as they get weaker and weaker. The thought’s almost too much to bear. I remember my mother saying, “Now I’m going to miss everything!” and how it broke my heart. Why can’t we all just be taken quickly when it’s our time, without suffering or pain? Or any knowledge that it’s coming?

The door slid open and a nurse appeared.

“We’re ready for you now,” she said, and rolled me into a procedure room. I was glad she’d taken my glasses; I didn’t want to look too closely at my surroundings. And within a minute, the smiling anesthesiologist appeared with a high-flow oxygen mask and bite block, saying I was going to get sleepy now and he’d see me on the other side.

“The other side?” I protested, before the anesthesia kicked in. “I hope not!” We both laughed. I knew what he meant. He just didn’t know what I’d been thinking about.

Dr. Google

Earlier a nurse had asked me if I worked in the medical field, the second time this month a nurse had asked me that same question. I do know a lot about medicine and sound like I know even more than I actually do because I know the lingo. Because my father was a doctor, we were around medicine our entire childhoods. But also I  am on close personal terms with Dr. Google. Which can be dangerous.

Knowledge is power, they say, but I’ve learned the hard way that WebMD is not always your friend. So I knew damn well that some of the things they were looking for were some of the worst things you could get.

Next thing I knew, I was groggily awake and being rolled out. In the holding room, the nurse busied herself getting my things together so I could get dressed.

“Were you really nervous before the procedure?” she asked me. Ha! Was I nervous? I knew she was referring to my pre-procedure blood pressure reading: something like 177/92, even though I’d been doing my best to calm myself.

My doctor strode confidently into the room to say that he’d seen no malignancies, but he’d biopsied some things that he thought might be indicative of a far less serious diagnosis. We’d know more in a week or two.

Saved, at least for the moment, I thought. But I knew that like my loved ones, one day a doctor would come out to talk to me and I’d face more than a fleeting lurch in my gut.

I am filled with love and compassion for my fellow oldies who have a close-up view of the end of their lives. And also increasingly convinced that my strong belief that consciousness goes on is going to be important to how I handle it when my time comes.

But let me tell you,  young friends: aging is a a trip.

(And BTW, the biopsies were negative.)