I'm Getting Younger (Really)

When they scanned my carotid arteries before I started apheresis therapy, the doc said 'You're 44 going on 80.'

This was based on the thickness of the artery walls, the atherosclerosis already taking place. This is why I've been going in for apheresis therapy every two weeks. I had a heart attack at 32, needed a double bypass at 43, and that's what you call early onset heart disease. Diet, drugs, exercise, I do all that, but I still clog up faster than a seedy gas station's toilet. This is thanks to a high level of LP(a), a little known blood component that is correlated with early onset heart disease, and LP(a) is something I seem to produce buckets of.

So they scanned my arteries after a year, warning me that dramatic changes aren't generally found after such a short time, it's usually three to five years out before you get much improvement.

But on one side the artery thickness was down 10%, on the other side more like 12%. There's no guarantee I'll ever be a senior citizen, nobody gets that locked in for sure. But it looks like this expensive, vaguely torturous process is paying dividends and some idiot urban redneck in a pickup is going to have to run me down on my bike to make sure I never see a Social Security check. Basically, now I'm 75, aging in reverse. In a few more years, maybe I can ease down into my fifites.