Medical report

My brother has been living in China for the last 10 months and will do so for a further year or so. He has been posting interesting accounts of his life over there, with plenty of pictures to accompany these e-mails.

He was a professor at a New Zealand university before he retired and has taken up a post at a Chinese university, hence his reason for being there.

Today he sent me a translated document outlying the results of an extensive medical examination he has had while there.

Whilst he has been in China, he has lost more than 10kg of weight, his blood pressure has dropped, halving his medication and he now walks to and from the university, about a 40-minute daily walk compared to zero exercise when he was in New Zealand. I would be celebrating those changes and achievements.

However, the report told a different story, outlining 22 conditions, ranging from most serious to least, with recommendations for several follow-up specialist clinics. I am not going to share the report’s findings as that would be a breach of his privacy but as he stated, makes for sobering reading.

My question here is, what would the normal results for a 72-year-old be? Isn’t old age exactly that, where our organs begin to function less efficiently because of degenerative changes? If we didn’t have these changes, we would live longer than we do.

I couldn’t imagine getting a report in New Zealand as detailed as the one my brother received. Would we even want to know? In my reply to his email, I suggested celebrating the gains he has made with his weight, blood pressure and exercise. These alone have probably added a few years to his life span. Our own father died of emphysema when he was 76 and many people don’t even make it into their 70s these days.

But the big thing with my brother’s report is that I know that my results would probably be quite similar. If nothing else, it has prompted me to seriously consider ways to lose weight in the coming year, perhaps this time with little changes that can be sustainable rather than the hard out diets that only result in the weight returning. I have been listening to the tapes from the body beliefs workshop and these have been useful.

Another New Year’s resolution coming up, I see.