Ageism, Long COVID and Senior Moments

Battling long COVID isn't just a personal health issue—it's become a crisis stretching across the nation, touching lives and economies. Join me, Bill Monty, as I recount my own skirmish with this formidable foe, and how it mirrors a growing public challenge that's snagging headlines and Senate committee meetings alike.
From the persistence of debilitating symptoms to the hurdles in healthcare and the haunting economic repercussions, this episode lays bare the true cost of long COVID and the pressing need for both recognition and action.

Then let's toast to the vintage years, where wisdom and wit become our trusted companions. Here's where I share my journey—complete with senior moments and the fight against the subtle sting of ageism. It's a reflection on the sweetness of aging, sprinkled with humor and seasoned with advocacy for dignity and respect. Whether you're navigating the tranquil waters of retirement or facing the stormy seas of job discrimination, this episode offers a hearty blend of stories and solutions, inviting listeners to embrace the rich tapestry of later life with open arms and a zest for the days ahead.

Chapters

• 0:00 Long COVID Challenges With Bill Monty
• 8:25 Embracing Aging and Fighting Ageism

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Information presented in the following program is for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as a statement of fact. Welcome to Bill Monty's Guide for Getting Older, the podcast that explores the art of aging gracefully and unlocking the secrets to a fulfilling life as we journey through the golden years. Join us each episode as we delve into captivating stories, personal insights and practical tips to embrace the aging process with grace, resilience and a dash of humor. Hello and welcome to Bill Monty's Guide for Getting Older. I am your host, Bill Monty, and this is the show for young people who have been alive for a very, very long time. We're still trying to move away and decide what to call ourselves once we reach a certain age, as we discussed on the last program. Also, as we discussed on the last program, we're going to be talking about a couple of subjects today. One of them is going to be long COVID and the recent Senate committee that was held to discuss that thing. We're going to have a senior moment and talk about some things that time has taught me. We're going to look at signs that your senior loved one might need some in-home care and, finally, we will be discussing ageism. So let's start off right now with the long COVID discussion.

Speaker 1: 1:42

This one is personal to me. I have had long COVID since my first bout, which was in March 2020, back when COVID started. After getting well and going into the months that followed, I found that I just wasn't getting that better. The fatigue was the first thing, but other things too problems with my eyes, joints that were hurting. My breath was no longer the same. I hear it in recording these podcasts. I was a performer for many, many, many years and a public speaker, and I never had a problem controlling my breath to where I sounded out of breath. I now have to take it easy when recording because I know that there is this problem with my breathing. I don't know how often it comes through and I sometimes try to clean it up in editing before you hear it. So long COVID is personal to me and I can tell you that getting people, even physicians, to believe that you have this condition is sometimes really hard. Skepticism is rampant about this disease, but I can tell you it's real. I know other people who know it's real and when you finally have the Health Education, labor and Pension Committee meet to discuss this and they meet with Americans, patients and doctors who are dealing with this, then it is real and part of the committee's goal was to find out what's going on and what needs to be done. So it was the committee chair, senator Bernie Sanders, who I have said before on this program and I still believe it one of the few, if not the only Senator who is looking at the problems of the everyday American and trying to find solutions for them and not getting involved in the politics of everything. I wish we had more people like Bernie Sanders. Instead, we have a Senate and a House full of people who just want to say no all the time. Everything's a battle. They're not looking to make life easier for us, they're making. They're looking to make life easier for them. Okay, but we're not going to get the politics anyway.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Back to Long COVID. In his opening remarks, committee chair Senator Bernie Sanders said that Long COVID is affecting an estimated 16 million Americans of all ages and backgrounds and it has not gotten the attention that it deserves, along with the escalating health impact, with rising risk from repeated infections. He said that Long COVID is also a drain on the nation's economy, with 4 million people out of work and 170 billion with a B in lost wages. During testimony from a panel of patients, one patient described being a runner for two decades before she developed Long COVID after an infection in 2020. She is now mostly homebound on 12 medications and receives weekly intravenous medical treatments at the hospital. She has good insurance coverage through her employer, but having insurance does not ensure access to care. She's had to fend for herself with the medical system to have the condition taken seriously and to get the treatments covered. Another patient, another person with long COVID said that her symptoms include chronic fatigue. Chronic pain, nausea and dizziness has kept her from returning to her job as a human resources administrator at a community college. She's had to go on short-term disability and then long-term disability and she is currently unemployed due to long COVID. Though long COVID now get this, get this one, folks. Though long COVID is a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, her applications for Social Security Disability have been denied twice Now. I wish I could say this is just a long COVID thing, but anyone who has tried to get Social Security Disability and that's a whole nother show knows how challenging that can be.

Speaker 1: 5:45

Another patient, nicole Heim, whose 16-year-old daughter contracted COVID during band class in September 2021, a month after she recovered, the mother receives a call from the high school nurse. Or daughter's shorter breath, extremely high pulse rate, unable to move her arms and her legs. After months of waiting and navigating prior authorization hoops in Medicaid, the daughter started receiving care at a long COVID specialty clinic and joined an NIH, that's the National Institutes of Health Pediatric COVID Outcome Study. Michelle Harkins, who's a doctor, talks about one of her patients, who is also a primary care doctor, who left her job because she no longer has the mental recall to do it properly. Ziad Al Ali, another doctor, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington State University in St Louis, is part of the team that first characterized long COVID. He emphasized the best way to prevent the condition is to prevent COVID infections. Thank you, doctor. I think we all kind of knew that one right. He pointed out, though, there are no FDA-approved treatments for long COVID, and you wanna know the reason for that? Because there are so many symptoms. If you're trying to get diagnosed, you get bounced from specialist to specialist to specialist, because there isn't one doctor who's covering everything. It's a really frustrating challenge to try to get this taken care of.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Thank you, senator Sanders, for bringing it to the National Forefront. There's more that we can say about it, but I think that you kind of understand where we're coming from on this right. If you have long, covid, I'd like you to write to us. All right, we want to get the word out. We're trying to put together people who have this so that we can try and find a solution. What are the challenges? If someone like Bernie Sanders is willing to listen to us, can get the Senate or the House to listen to us, then we need to activate as a people. So write to me at billmonti04 at gmailcom. Bill Monti, that's M-O-N-T-Y 04 at gmailcom. Just give me your contact information. I'll reach out to you so we can see if we can start formulating some type of plan here. Because, my friends, we're gonna have to do it ourselves. I don't think we can sit around waiting for a government that can't decide anything these days because they're so polarized to help us. This should be really not that hard, but it seems to be kinda hard, so we're gonna take care of it ourselves. All right, now let's move on to whoops. We're gonna take a quick break, hold on quick break and then we will be right back.

Speaker 1: 8:25

My friends, I'm so excited to announce that we are now part of an online network BabyBoomerorg. Babyboomer that's singularorg. This is where you can go to find more information and resources on things BabyBoomers are into. There's more podcasts. They have so many podcasts there. Always listen to mine first, of course. They have articles from authors. There's audio books, there's online courses, there's games, there's news information. It's so much going on on one website. It's one stop shopping. That's BabyBoomerorg. You can hear Bill Monty's guide for getting older there. You can also hear Bill Monty's tales from South Florida. Even if you don't live in South Florida, I think you're gonna like it. Give it a listen, babyboomerorg. And now back to the show.

Speaker 1: 9:27

And now it's time for a senior moment, the senior moments now. Generally that has kind of a negative connotation, but I take my senior moment to make a point and make a stand. Well, look at some things that time has taught me. People say that getting older is tough. You slow down, everything gets a little tougher, a little harder. That's looking at the negative folks.

Speaker 1: 9:55

There's a lot of great things about getting older. For instance, most of our life is spent chasing false goals and worshiping false ideals. The day you realize that is the day you really start to live. One of the things about getting older that I like is that I'm able to prioritize things easier. Those things that used to drive me crazy don't mean that much now. Hey, listen, do I still get nuts at bad drivers on the road or stupid politicians? Yes, I do, but it's the other things I try not to let get to me. As you get older, you realize there's just some things that are really important in life, and the rest of it is a bunch of bubble misies.

Speaker 1: 10:37

As my mother-in-law used to say, you truly, really, truly, cannot please all of the people all of the time. Please yourself first. You're loved one second, and everyone else is busy pleasing themselves. Anyway, trust me, you don't got to worry about them. So true, that doesn't mean be a jerk, though. All right, be nice to people, it's not that hard to do.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Say thank you, say please, hold a door open for someone had a wonderful conversation last night with a gentleman who's opened up a restaurant close to us and he came by to see how he liked our food. We got to have a conversation about the challenges that he's having with labor and just how does he get word out, and so we tried to be encouraging. We told him this was our fourth time coming to the restaurant in the short time they've been open, that we really enjoyed his food, that his pricing is fair, his staff is nice, so that's really nice. He appreciated that. This is a guy back there working hard in the kitchen, doing hard work but producing something really great. When you see something like that, tell somebody something like that. All right, let people know when something's really going good and if something's really going bad yeah, if it's really affecting you, of course, say something. It's not necessary to say something all the time. Don't be that person who makes life harder for other people.

Speaker 1: 12:03

Fighting the aging process like trying to catch the wind. Go with it, enjoy it. Your body's changing, but your body has always been changing. Your body's not the same as it was when you were an infant or a toddler or a young child or a teenager. Don't waste time trying to reverse that. Instead, change your mindset to see the beauty in the new. Hey, am I happy with the way I look now versus the way I looked when I was 25? Absolutely not. I got hair growing in places that I never grew before and where it's supposed to be growing, and it's not growing at all. I got weight I can't lose and I got bending I can't do anymore. Yeah, it's all part of the process, and I could whine about it, I could complain about it. There's enough things going on in the world to bring you down. Beating yourself up for something you can't control shouldn't be one of them.

Speaker 1: 12:52

So that's my senior moment for today, folks. We're going to be continuing this on future episodes. Now let's look at some of the lighter side of getting older, what you call someone who enjoys Mondays retired. You know it's time to retire when your co-workers are wearing clothing from your youth and calling it retro. Retirement is wonderful. It's doing nothing without worrying about getting caught. Isn't that the truth? When is the best time to start thinking about your retirement before the boss does? That's going to lead us into our next discussion here, and it's something that you're actually, if you're paying attention, you're seeing in the news a lot right now, and that's ageism. Now, let us not kid ourselves. Ageism is very real.

Speaker 1: 13:49

I know that I can talk from personal experience. I could tell you tales. Is it true that everyone, no matter your race, your religious belief, your sexual orientation, your gender identity, whatever it is, is everyone in the world discriminated against at some point in their lives? I believe so. I'm not trying to shortchange anybody else. I know there's terrible things that happen to people. We've seen it all in the last 10 years or so a lot here, and certainly history proves that time and time again.

Speaker 1: 14:25

I am an older white male. If popular theory was correct, I should be rich, I should be retired, I should be having a great time, I should never encounter discrimination. But the fact is I live on planet Earth and I live among people and I am discriminated against. So here's my personal story about it and I'll tell you where this is all coming from. So, going back four years ago five years ago, something like that I suddenly found myself unemployed. I was 62 years old, thought I would be at the job I was at until I decided to retire. I had been there a long, long time. Many, many years Was thoroughly thrown when I was let go due to shuffling the department and the elimination of my position. I thought no problem, I'm well known in this industry, I'll go out, I'll have a job in a couple of weeks. So I went out and started interviewing.

Speaker 1: 15:37

You know, getting the interview in and of itself is kind of tough. We all know that. I got an interview with a company that I had worked very closely with in the other position and I was meeting with the head of the organization. Now he also has his regular day job, but the other part of it that he did was head of their nonprofit board and he did the hiring for this position. It was a marketing position.

Speaker 1: 16:03

I got to the office early and was there and I was led into his office where I waited a few minutes and when he came in we were talking for a few minutes and I could tell that the interview was going south Because the questions he was asking, the attitude that he had and I was really talking up the experience that I had with it and how I could be of assistance to his organization. And he finally looked at me and said and I couldn't believe it if I had known your age, I would have never agreed to interview you Now. That could be taken several different ways. I think the way I interpreted it is the correct way. All of the experience I had didn't matter. When he looked at me, he saw a guy with with hair that was starting to turn white, much wider now, gray in his beard, definitely an older American, and I was not what he wanted, but he had the gall to actually tell me in so many words, but in such a way that you couldn't actually prove anything. I Started finding that to be the case over and over and over again. I was hired eventually for different positions. Covid took care of that, and now I'm in a position that's very nice and my age actually helps me in that position.

Speaker 1: 17:19

I bring all this up because of the conversation that's going on with the presidential election and Nikki Haley has brought up how competent are Joe Biden and Donald Trump, because of their age, to run for the position of president? And Well, I there's a part of me that agrees and I wish there was an age limit. Just like you, you have to be a certain age to Run for president. I think there should be an age where you can't run for president anymore. I remember when Ronald Reagan was president and I don't remember his age. I'm gonna be honest with you. So if I get this wrong, don't send me a bunch of email, tell me how stupid I am. But let's say 73 and the comedian Dennis Miller from Saturday Live at, in his stand-up act and at that time he was quite liberal had said something along the lines of you know, ronald Reagan and 73 years old and he has access to the. You know the bomb. My grandfather is 73 years old. We don't let him have the TV remote. Now, there's humor in that and there's kind of like an ageist joke to that too. But should there be a restriction on how old you could be to run for president of the United States? I love your thoughts on that.

Speaker 1: 18:31

You can write to us at bill montez04 at gmailcom or you can leave us a voicemail. Now Let me explain about the voicemail. No one's gonna answer this. If you call, expect there to be an answer. This line is never picked up. It goes directly to voicemail. That's at 754 800 317 0. 754 800 317 0. It's in my notes also.

Speaker 1: 18:51

If you could just leave a message or write, you know, what do you think about this idea that the two leaders right now running for president could potentially be too old? I think Donald Donald Trump will be 77 or 78 and Joe Biden would be 81 and is ageism, you know, if we ask that they take some kind of test to prove that they are of the mental health to be able to do the job, is that ageism? It can be tricky to identify. You know, a Ball player at 50 is considered too old and doesn't play anymore. You know, so it's kind of like. I guess it depends on the job, right? But it is true. I wonder also have you ever run into any aging Discrimination? Be interested to hear that. So let us know so. And just talking about it, I think we're, you know. I think it's something that's going to be part of the national Discussion as we move more and more into the presidential election and something we all need to be aware of.

Speaker 1: 19:52

Finally, I want to Look at and give you some hints here. I know one of the things that is the toughest as a family member or someone who's caring for Someone who is a young person who's been alive for a really really long time is Is trying to determine if what they're seeing in the person means they should be looking at getting some help. Or is it just natural aging? And yes, there's some memory loss, there's something like this. So this is from an article from USA today Signs that your senior loved one might need some help, including in-home senior care.

Speaker 1: 20:29

When it comes to determining when your elderly loved one might need some in-home care, you should be looking at are they having difficulty with daily activities? Are they struggling to bathe, dress, groom themselves or even to prepare their meals? Are there signs of memory loss, confusion or what might be, dementia? You know that's tough to say. Trying to diagnose dementia at home is not a good idea. Go to your doctor for that. If you think that's what it is.

Speaker 1: 20:54

Medication management if your loved one forgets to take medications or does so incorrectly, then you know this means they. You might need some help because you want to do so much for your Senior loved one as a caregiver. If you're still working, that's going to be difficult, but even if you're not working, once you realize this is starting to become a 24-7 job From which there is no days off. There are no better days. Once things start going downhill, then don't be afraid to say that you need help.

Speaker 1: 21:23

Chronic health conditions, chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, arthritis if they start coming along, is that sign that things are starting to go wrong? Yes, it could be expressions of loneliness or depression. Limited social interaction and participation in activities might be signs that your loved one might need more help and that you that also could help you in the long run. Is there significant weight loss or signs of malnutrition? Is there difficulty with Transportation because your loved one now is no longer to drive, no longer able to drive safely? Inability to manage Finances, mismanagement of finances you start to see bills come in that aren't being paid. Late notices, final notices, decline in personal hygiene you know personal hygiene is one of those things that's a real red flag that you should be looking out for. So just some of the signs that if you are looking for help or if you're concerned, listen first place you should go as your family physician, your primary caregiver, find out what help there is.

Speaker 1: 22:27

Back, go back and listen to episode 5. Who can I turn to? We talk there about where, locally, you can get help. Just remember that in every state there is an area agency on aging. These are Everywhere. Every state has them. They have multiple ones, they cover different counties, cities, areas, and that's where you can go for a lot of help. So look that up. Alright, my friends? That is going to do it for this week. It's a very rainy Sunday here in South Florida, so I'm gonna go see if we have a lake that's starting to rise up to the doorstep. Always fun in the sunshine state. Today it's the liquid sunshine state. I Remind you to please take care of yourself, be good to yourself and always be kind, at least whenever possible. And you know what? It's always possible. Until next time, my friends. This is Bill Monty, thanking you for listening to Bill Monty's guide for getting older.