This is a platform where general concerns can be voiced. Issues of health, of life and death, are issues that we all share increasingly as we age. We can be a support for  classmates, or we can speak about events in our own lives and hopefully get feedback from someone who has ‘been there/done that.’

From Judy Sayler Olmer, September 30, 2016

Travel and the Aging Bod

I recently returned to my home in Maryland from three weeks in my hometown of Portland, OR. I was blindsided my first morning back by a legendary case of jet lag. I felt drugged all day, though I’d taken nothing to sleep that first night—and in fact had slept reasonably well. Sleep walking through the day, I barely got my suitcase unpacked and some laundry started. Things were better the next day, but it was three or four days before I felt normal again.

This will sound familiar to many of you, I know, since it’s obvious from my mail that we are still a peripatetic class, with lots of foreign and domestic travel. I’ve experienced similar bouts of jet lag before, but only on longer trips—to Asia, Australia, fairly distant parts of Europe. I’d prided myself on handling travel within the US with a minimum of disruption. This was new and rather worrisome, since I go back and forth between east and west coasts several times a year.

How about the rest of you? Have others noticed a similar change in their tolerance for long and even medium distance travel and time changes? Are there other changes that—while not horrendous in and of themselves—remind you that, indeed, we are getting older and life as we knew it has been affected?