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So I get up one morning and look in the mirror. Who in the world is this old guy looking back at me. When I went to bed last night, I was only forty years old. Now look at me pushing seventy. Hey, don't complain about growing old, because when you stop growing old, you're dead. I'm jimpauling, and this is my view from the middle. I have no idea who to attributes that quote to, but I liked it better than the more famous one from Mark Twain that says, do not complain about growing old. It's a privilege denied to many. It's weird how certain age perceptions stick in your brain. To me, my mom and dad are always sixty years old, my brother is always twenty one years old, and I'm only seven. Of course, that's all ridiculous since my mother and father are long gone. My brother is now in his eighties, and I'm approaching my seventieth birthday. I have no idea how I got so old. I really don't feel seventy. I have to keep checking the calendar, looking up my birthday and doing the math. Yep, seventy years old. Maybe when I wake up on my birthday, everything I got we'll hit the floor and I'll feel like I'm seventy. But for right now, I'm still operating as if I'm in my forties. I got a notice on Facebook the other day if my high school class fifty second reunion, the theme of which is now, holy cow, We're seventy. Well, gee, guys, thanks for reminding me. Actually the word they use wasn't cow, but I'm trying to keep this PG. Many of you who have followed this podcast series already know my backstories on cancer. I survived it twice, once in twenty ten with prostate cancer, for which I had radiated titanium seeds inserted into my prostate, which eventually knocked it out if the cancer that is not my prostate, Then again in twenty twenty three, when the pimple from Hell appeared on my left cheek just below my ear, which started as squim a cell carcinoma, but graduated very quickly to parotid gland cancer, requiring facial surgery and proton radiation treatments, the side effects of which still plague me to this day. I'm not going to list all the problems that it's caused, but i will say that my primary care doctor doesn't hesitate to tie in the radiation treatments to any number of health issues on facing. Not to worry, none of them are really serious, just annoying. I volunteer at the Orlando Health Cancer Institute once a week in the guest services area. I'm what they call a wayfinder. I show people how to get to various places in the hospital complex for appointments, treatment, or to simply visit friends and loved ones. Sometimes people will ask me why I volunteer now, Being the smart ass I am, I usually say that, well, I spent one hundred and twenty thousand dollars on treatment here, so I felt the least I could do is come back and work for free. That usually results in a weird look. Others will say, oh, oh, isn't this nice that you're doing this to give back a little Yeah, well, I suppose that's true, But actually I don't do it for any real noble cause other than to give myself perspective. When it comes to my petdly little side effects, I fall way down the sympathy scale compared to the people I meet at the Institute on a weekly basis. I'm a bit of a goofball and I'd like to cut up with people, especially since I know that most of them don't want to be there. I mean, really, who wants to be in a hospital unless someone is having a baby or something. But I work in the cancer center, so there's not a lot of that going on there. I deal with people coming in for chemotherapy, infusions, radiation treatments, and bone marrow therapy. Not a lot of celebrations going on there, at least not until they ring the bell at the end of their course of radiation or chemo treatments. I love it when they ring the bell, but then they can't wait to get the heck out of there. I have about six dad jokes that I rotate around the fifty or so people I'll come in contact with in a day at the center. I figure, if I can make someone smile in the midst of going through what is probably a horrible experience, then well I've done my part. I asked to be stationed at the cancer center because that's where I received my cancer treatments and my doctors, my ologists, you know, radiation oncologists, dental oncologist, hematologist, speech pathologists, etc. Etc. They're all there in the Cancer center. I actually have ten, count them, ten ologists. How many do you have? That's what I thought. One thing you have to get used to when you're older is planning all your recreational activities around your ologists appointments. Anyway, most of my docs are really congenial. But when I first started seeing the lady dental oncologist, she seemed to have a real chip on her shoulder. Now I don't want to mention her name here, so let's just call her doctor Janet. I think she thought I was gonna give her a hard time and not follow any of her instructions, so she was acting like a real well, you know the B word. Anyway, the older dudes who come in for their appointments at the institute tend to glom onto me and usually want to chat it up. Many of them don't know why they're old either. Some are still in denial about it. I had one guy start jawing to me about the appointments he had that day with the different doctors in the hospital. You know, I had to meet with this one guy, and now I gotta go see this other quack, and then I gotta go see that wicked old witch over there in that other building. I jump in and say, oh, you mean doctor Janet. Yeah, that's her, she's a witch. Whoops, Yeah, I was right. We were talking about the same doc. Apparently my impression affair was not exactly the minority view. But I did feel kind of bad and hope that this conversation didn't get back to doctor Janet to be fair. Over time, doctor Janet softened her attitude toward me and no longer exhibited the chip on her shoulder after she realized I would actually follow her instructions instead of deciding upon my own course of treatment. I did the feeling many of the older, probably male patients probably resist her advice and go rogue on their treatment, and that's why she acts that way. Now here's a time when I really put my foot in my mouth. While volunteering, I stand that the guest services desk at the Cancer Institute, patients coming in for chemotherapy or radiation treatment can valiate their cars right there at the door of the center and then go to the guest services desk and validate their parking tickets so they don't have to pay for it. Well, one of my six dad jokes I blurt out manifests itself. When someone comes to me instead of going to the guest services desk and says, can you validate me? I of course say, sure, you're a fine person and you'll do wonderful things in life. There you're validated. Doesn't do a darn thing for your parking, but there it is. Most everyone laughs, and then I direct them to someone who's not a smart ass and can actually validate their parking. Well, so one day this guy comes up to me nice, all smiles and friendly like, and says, can you validate me? So of course I blurt out my usual nonsense to joke. He laughs, but then he says, yeah, my wife just died. You know those inflatable Christmas ornaments people put on the front lawns during the season, Well, I felt like one of those ornaments that someone has just taken a knife to and deflated. How do you come back from that? But in my defense, the guy was all smiles and seemed to be in a good mood. Later found out from my courts and the Volunteer Services office that that sort of thing happens a lot. Seems everyone had a similar experience with a patient at one time or another. Another thing about growing old is you start to get a bit crotchety. You know, you kids, get off my lawn, that sort of thing. I've talked about this a bit in another episode. I've never really yelled at any kids to get off my lawn, and if you've seen my lawn you'd know why. But I do find myself being a lot crankier than I was before I retired at the end of twenty twenty one. Among the things I get cranky about is how cyber criminal try to take advantage of seniors. They think we're stupid and shun technology, and in some cases they're right. But I'm not a member of that group, and it annoys me to see them victimizing those who are. Almost daily I get an email from what is purported to be the Social Security Administration saying that my benefits are about to be cut off unless I click here to fix it. Of course, clicking here would mean they would gain access to my financial records and probably clean me out. That email is pretty easy to spot since it comes from a Gmail address. Yeah right, that's legit. Another attempt to snooker as old folks is the email, This one from an address like Swatsformalitiesoon dot com or something like that, but it looks like it comes from Amazon Support saying my Prime membership has expired. Click here to fix it. Yeah right, Or I'll get an email that looks like it's from my internet provider that says my automated payment didn't go through. They want me to re enter my payment information. They use various bogus email domains to send those. Somebody must be falling for these things, otherwise they would probably stop making the attempt. Then there's the text message scam that's even been reported on the TV news, where someone pretending to be the Florida Department of Transportation is saying I have unpaid tolls and if I don't click here to fix it, I'll soon be sending the goons to come arrest me. I'm paraphrasing, but you kind of get the idea. I get a boatload of email from various sources that look like transaction receipts thanking me for my PayPal payment of six hundred and semidd dollars. I guess I'm supposed to freak out and start clicking away. Problem is I don't have a PayPal account. Some of these proporterally come from antivirus software companies like Norton and mcavee. I guess because the scammers think you're more likely to believe they're legitimate if it's coming from a company that's supposed to protect you from well them. The sad thing about this is I do know some seniors who would buy into these scams and stand the chance of getting hurt. These emails are getting more and more sophisticated and can be hard to identify sometimes as scams. You see stories in the media all the time about a senior whose retirement savings was wiped out because they believed in one of these things. There's a video on Facebook. You've probably seen these things or something like it. They're long and involved, and they go on and on and on about solving a problem, usually target it again towards seniors, making it sound like if you don't watch the video to the end, you're going to miss out on some life changing or life enhancing breakthrough. This one was a video that had Dick Van Dyke, who you know is now one hundred plus years old, and Bill Gates of mega dollar fame, touting a cure or at least a preventative measure for Alzheimer's disease that uses cacao and honey for eighty cents a day or some such thing. Newsflash, folks, there isn't a cure for Alzheimer's disease, at least not yet. If you do a Google search or check snopes dot com, you find that this is an AI generated video of Van Dyke and Gates and the whole thing is just a bogus scam. Add that the Facebook group can somehow censor out political content they don't like, but this out and out bogus line to your digital face crap is somehow allowed to continue. There used to be a TV commercial for the Jitterbug phone designed for seniors. My blood pressure would shoot up ten points when this ad came on. This thing had big buttons on it. You could see from the International Space Station, and if you wanted to store a phone number, you actually called their operator and have them do it for you. Good grief. The old geezer in the commercial, yeah, I can call in that because he kind of looks like me and sounds like me, and it's probably my age or younger. But he looks at the camera and says it's just a good phone, as if that's all he could ever figure out how to use on the silly thing. I felt like throwing my walker and false teeth at the screen whenever that came on. I'm kidding, I don't have either of those. The commercial aggravated me because it made seniors, especially older guys, look like simple minded, technologically challenged idiots that need their grandkids to show them how to use their phone. Trust me, despite what you may think, these guys are in the minority and they need to wake up and live in the twenty first century before it's too late. If you're alive in twenty twenty six, live in twenty twenty six, modify the year to match the date on which you are listening to this podcast. So there I am in the middle the years they go by, whether I'm ready for them to or not, and plenty of people trying to take advantage of what they think are technologically challenged old geezers. Hey, I'm not technologically challenged, and I'm proud to be a geezer. Remember, don't complain about growing old, because when you stop growing old, you're dead. I'm jimpaulling, and that's my view. From the middle of what to sellish