The Slow and Steady Decline...Continues

(Part 5...) or The Aspirin Incident

About a month or so ago while I was visiting my parents on a Saturday morning, as I often do, my mother interrupted our regularly scheduled, innocuous conversation about coupons and supermarket sales and recipes when she asked me in her oh-so-lovable Polish accent, “Joanne, you take aspirin?”

I looked at her a little askance as I tried to process what she said and figure out what she meant by what she said. After all, weren’t we just talking about making oatmeal stove top, and not my sore left hip (for which I definitely prefer ibuprofen)? But she followed up, leaving no room for misunderstanding.

(Read with her accent, it is verbatim my mother.)

“Here,” she said as she picked up a bottle of Bayer 81 mg aspirin, “Dr. Oz say if you take at night you sleep good too. I take mine morning but… here, you take.”

“Ma,” I began to protest, but she would not have it.

“Take, take,” she said, meaning the bottle of low dose aspirin she was passing across the kitchen island. “I buy for you. You should take,” she continued, also meaning then: take one every day, at night, per Dr. Oz to prevent your middle aged heart from having a heart attack.

How we got from "button your coat" and "why you no wear hat?" to "take aspirin for your heart" is a forty-something year old journey, more book than blog post. But when your mother tells you to start taking more care of your heart, well, you do more than count your lucky stars that your mom is still around to shepherd you through middle age. You listen.