urban versus rural life
Boomers & the Reality of Mortality
OK, for all of you young oldsters out there who have decided you will be living forever, this is fair warning.
I was recently diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), and no, I never smoked cigarettes! This is probably the result of living in dirty city air for 60+ years, and having what seemed like constant bronchitis since age 25. I also just moved to a home at 7,000 feet elevation. All of these factors caused shortness of breath and a request for a chest x-ray. Possible lung nodules were found leading to a cat scan this past Monday. As a non-smoking 61 year-old, I did not expect any problem. Instead my cat scan found a number of “nodules” in my lungs.
Overall, the likelihood that a lung nodule is cancer is 40 percent, but the risk of a lung nodule being cancerous varies considerably depending on several things like the size of them, whether you smoke, your occupation, shape of nodules and their rate of growth. Lung nodules — small masses of tissue in the lung — are quite common. They appear as round, white shadows on a chest X-ray or computerized tomography (CT) scan, and are often caused by previous infections.
Think it can’t happen to you?
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with 1.8 million new cases diagnosed yearly. In the United States, lung cancer is the most fatal cancer in women, surpassing breast cancer in 1987 as the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. It is also the most fatal cancer in men, killing more men than prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and colon cancer combined. Lung cancer in never-smokers is the sixth leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States.
Overall, 27 percent of cancer deaths in the U.S. are due to lung cancer.
Who Gets Lung Cancer?
The average age for lung cancer is 70, and 80 percent of people who develop lung cancer have smoked, but lung cancer occurs in women and lung cancer occurs in non-smokers. While lung cancer in men who have smoked is decreasing, lung cancer in non-smokers is increasing.
It’s estimated that 20 percent of women who develop lung cancer in the U.S. have never smoked, and that number increases to 50 percent worldwide. Lung cancer also occurs in young adults – It’s estimated that 13.4 percent of lung cancers occur in adults under the age of 40. While this number may seem small, when compared to the incidence of lung cancer overall, it is not.
In summary, if you haven’t had a lung x-ray in years, get one. My nodules are small and so we have decided to go with a wait and see plan, with cat scans every few months. It’s only a problem if they start to grow.
Now I live in a rural Colorado county with nice clean air, but all those years of living in cities must be catching up with me… How about you?
My insights into Cannabinoid (CBD) Oil
Cannabinoid (CBD) Oil is new to me. I talked to a few people in the past few months who thought that it helped them immensely with pain from sciatica, sleep issues, etc. It took me a lot of online research and thought to decide to buy some, partially because it is quite expensive and I wondered about issues of purity also.
For those of you new to this product, this oil is made from hemp with no THC in it. It is usually taken by a few drops under your tongue, and has no psychoactive ingredients. That is why it is legal in all states. The FDA has ruled it to be a dietary supplement. I didn’t buy it at a marijuana dispensary, just a natural foods store.
I bought a small bottle of That’s Natural CBD Oil with the ingredients of Hemp Seed Oil, Grape Seed Oil, Peppermint Oil and 250mg Hemp CBD Oil. This stuff is guaranteed not to contain marijuana or to have psychoactive effects.
I started out with just a few drops under my tongue once or twice a day. At first the only real effect it had on me was I didn’t wake up as often at night. I took it for a few weeks and then stopped for a few days to see if I felt any different. I was surprised to learn how much those few drops were helping with both my mood and my ability to sleep more deeply. I can’t say it helped at all with my arthritis pain. Still stuck with Aleve there.
But I can recommend that the rest of you check this out. Here’s a few articles I found interesting:
https://healthyhempoil.com/what-is-cbd-in-weed/
http://herb.co/2016/09/18/menopause-symptoms/
Some history:
“Cannabis plants are exceptionally versatile. Both the seeds and cannabis oil were used for food in China as early as 6,000 BCE. Two thousand years later, in 4,000 BCE, there is evidence of textiles made from hemp in both China and Turkestan. The influence of the plant seems to have been global. In 850, the Vikings transported hemp rope and seeds to Iceland, and by the year 900, Arabs were learning techniques for making paper from hemp. By the year 1000 Italians were using ropes made of hemp on their sailing ships.
In contrast to today’s modern restrictions of growing cannabis, England’s King Henry VIII actually fined farmers if they do not raise hemp for industrial use. Less than one hundred years later, settlers in Jamestown, Virginia began growing hemp plants for hemp’s unusually strong fibers. Once the plant demonstrated its usefulness, it became illegal to NOT grow hemp in Virginia.
By 1850, cannabis was added to The U.S.Pharmacopeia, a respected compendium of Medicines and Dietary Supplements. At that time cannabis was used throughout United States as a medicine, easily purchased in pharmacies and general stores. This lasted until about 1915…
(https://discovercbd.com/blogs/cbd-news/88739206-the-history-of-cbd-10-000-years-and-counting)
I’m a newcomer to rural southern Colorado. After two years I decided to compile a short journal about the ups and downs of moving from a good-sized city to rural America to build a passive solar retirement home in the foothills:
A Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar in Southern Colorado
Please share this information with your friends if they are considering similar life changes. Feel free to contact me directly to discuss any of these challenges, and to order your own signed copies of any of my books! Cheers, Laura Lee (email me: MidlifeCrisisQueen@gmail.com)
Air Pollution, Dementia and City Life
More than 50 million people around the world live with dementia, but the causes of this disease that robs us of our memories and brain power, are not well understood. We received some bad news on this topic this week. As many as 11% of dementia cases in people living within 50 meters of a major road could be caused by pollution and/or traffic noise, a new study suggests. The researchers, who followed nearly 2 million people in Canada over eleven years, say air pollution or noisy traffic could be contributing to the brain’s decline.
This study, published in the Lancet, followed nearly two million people in the Canadian province of Ontario, between 2001 and 2012. There were 243,611 cases of dementia diagnosed during that time, but the risk was greatest in those living closest to major roads.
Compared with those living more than 300 meters away from a major road, the risk was 7% higher within 50 meters, 4% higher between 50-100 meters and 2% higher for those within 200 meters. Researchers adjusted their data to account for other risk factors like poverty, obesity, education levels and smoking so these are unlikely to explain the link.
Pollution particles ‘get into brain’
Dr Hong Chen, from Public Health Ontario, one of the report authors, said:
“Increasing population growth and urbanization have placed many people close to heavy traffic, and with widespread exposure to traffic and growing rates of dementia, even a modest effect from near-road exposure could pose a large public health burden…More research to understand this link is needed, particularly into the effects of different aspects of traffic, such as air pollutants and noise.”
Add to this the fact that dementia is quickly becoming the leading cause of death, and it becomes harder to deny that living in polluted cities is killing us.
Many studies have focused on the impact of dirty air on the lungs and heart. In early 2016 the World Health Organisation warned that air pollution was leading to as many as three million premature deaths every year. Now, tiny particles of pollution have been discovered inside samples of brain tissue, providing the first evidence that minute particles of what is called magnetite from air pollution, find their way into our brains.
My initial response to this new research is dah! When I first heard about my own serious case of COPD last month, I said to the doctor, “Yes, I’ve had bronchitis in some of the most interesting places.” (Bangkok, Taipei, China, Venice…)
Asia is particularly dirty and I have spent far too much time living there. And Europe isn’t much better, but realistically, most of us breathe polluted air all of the time and somehow believe it isn’t affecting our health. Surprise! It all catches up with you sooner or later.
For decades I have had a personal appreciation of the American Lung Association’s tag line: “When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters…”
The human race always moves towards FREEDOM
I saw an interesting exchange of ideas on Meet the Press this past Sunday. One speaker I found most outstanding was Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”
What a wise, informative, and well-spoken woman! I found this discussion interesting on a lot of different levels, but I could personally relate to it in terms of our own recent ‘migration’ out of the city…
Another part of the conversation I enjoyed was with the author of 
But this is the great thing about holidays: They’re temporal gateways, urging us collectively to enact virtual rituals. Today is not just any random day. It’s a shift, proclaimed around the world. And into that gaping chasm between old year and new, that crevasse over which we now walk a short bright temporary bridge, we can hurl those warped lenses and fun house mirrors, all of us. Down that gap we can yell our last harsh words about ourselves, and hear their echoes dissolve into gibberish then ebb into that vast, inviting silence as we hasten, set free, to that smiling, untried other side.”
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 