I have seen what happens to those when age comes to town. Drugs, likely all kinds, often heart related meds that bring problems of there own.
 Friends age as well, you and them get mobility problems, visits become infrequent then stop. Income drops, costs rise.
People loose their drivers license and if rural that is like a death sentence. Increasing vision problems along with balance issues will leave you unable to perform lots of home repairs.
Stairs will become difficult then dangerous. In social relations with others you will find your thoughts and wishes ignored then just unwanted. You may find  someone eager to assist you, and they will, right up to the point they prey on you for gain.
I have seen all this and more. I am not going anywhere with this post, just giving the facts of life, and saying prepare ahead for this.   

As a person with serious mobility issues (I'm missing a leg, lol), I can say with authority that surviving very long on my own on a Doomstead would be impossible.  However, as part of a larger group of Doomers, it would not be hard at all, assuming the doomstead is properly set up.

I have 4 mobility devices, plus a prosthetic leg, crutches and canes. Two of my mobility devices are electric, a 24V electric wheelchair mostly for indoor use but it does function outdoors as long as the terrain is fairly flat and a 4 wheel 48V electric scooter for outdoor use.  Both use standard deep cycle 12V batts.  In addition if I have repair issues with my electrics. I have a standard manual wheelchair and I recently modified a knee scooter for use with my amputated leg.

I couldn't do anything requiring climbing or chopping wood etc, but I could easily run and maintain a hydroponic or aquaculture system, do food preservation and preparation and a variety of electrical wiring and plumbing tasks, although I'd likely need a helper with better hands.  A kid age 10 or more would do fine.

On the plus side, since I already live a pretty cicumscribed existence, I am already used to being stuck in one place so I'm over the cabin fever psychological hump.  I don't take any meds besides pain killers, which I could do without though it would be unpleasant.

My outdoor scooter has a 40 mile range on a charge, so as long as there are still some kind of stores open I could go shopping or trade goods with nearby doomsteads.  A small solar PV setup would easily keep my mobility devices charged up.

All that being said, it's pretty obvious that the medical issues you accumulate with age will shorten the length of the human lifespan back to where it was before the days of modern medicine fairly rapidly.  Going back as recently as the early 20th century, average lifespan for men was 65.  Go back to the 1800s, it was in the 50s.  The modern epidemic we have with diabetes will quickly kill off a lot of people once insulin becomes unavailable.  Even just bad vision will shorten average lifespan as prescription lenses become hard to find.  Many more women will once again die in childbirth and few premature infants will survive.

Now, there are these days quite a few Doomers well into their 70s still fortunate to have decent health and all their limbs who run their doomsteads mostly on their own or together with a wife of similar age.  Many of them do it as a refuge for children and grandchildren to come to when SHTF Day arrives.  It's a good retirement hobby for people like that.

I have no progeny, nor do I have any real desire to live any longer once we have reached the point in collapse where the power is sporadic, food is hard to come by and the society is coming apart at the seams.  I fully expect to be one of the first to go when SHTF Day arrives, and I am quite ready to cash in my ticket to the Great Beyond.  I consider myself along with Lou Gherig to be the Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth, to have lived to see the end of Industrial Civilization and had a great ride to get here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNLKPaThYkE

RE

Well another fact of life in getting older is the physical decline that creeps up on a person, the loss of muscle mass. This nearly finished me today. I was falling trees for firewood and I will spare the details, enough to say it did not go the way I planed, could not move out of the way of a tree that bounced off the ground, fast enough when things went sideways.
In a instant I was both struck sideways by it then pinned under it. A big Poplar, no help, no one to find me. Pain like you would not believe. I did not have the strength to shift it. After I quit panicking I found I was just barely able to reach the chainsaw and cut it off of me. Looks like I only have a single broken bone in one foot but my left leg is not working right, nearly pulled out of the hip socket. the other leg and foot swollen so bad it is scary to look at. Even with heavy morphine the pain is bad, there will be no sleep tonight.
Roughly 25 years of cutting trees here, only two accidents and both in the last 3 years. I have to change how I am doing things, recognise I cant do things like I once could. I am going to be one hurting unit tomorrow. I don't like the thought of being cyote food. The only reason my hip did not break was that the ground by the waters edge was soft muskeg.

Sounds like a really bad and very frightening episode.  Can I ask how old you actually are?

Another resident here who still has most of his marbles but is slightly deaf is one of the few residents I chat with regularly.  He's significantly older than me in his late 70s I think,  but like me patrols the facility on an electric wheelchair.  He's actually more social than I am, he spends around 1 hour a day at each of the 6 "courts" which have 17 rooms around a common area, then the 6 courts themselves surround an even larger common are where the main desk is situated by the front entrance.  He also parks there for a while each day.  I tend to spend most of my day the same as I always have, in front of my computer in my room.

He is here because he lived out in the bush here after serving in Vietnam where he was one of the victims of the Agent Orange fiasco, which the military paid off dishing out big settlements to the victims.  According to him, he got nearly $1M, which he parlayed over the years to about $3M flipping houses and buying at auctions stuff like 4 wheelers from oil companies that went bust in the 80s, then reselling them individually from his front lawn.  I take this with a grain of salt because old folks here will claim to be rich, but why stay here if you could afford a private 24/7 CNA?

His explanation is that besides the big settlement, it's the VA not Medicaid paying his bills here, and his monthly retirement check is from the military not SS, which Medicade would garnish all but $200, as they are now doing to me.  So, why should he spend money for private help, when he gets this for free?  Gotta agree with that reasoning.

Anyhow, what landed him here was that  one day he was out behind his doomstead fixing the fence I think, when he slipped and broke both legs sliding down the embankment.  Worse yet, it was 30 below, and before he was lucky to be found, he froze and lost all his fingers and half of each foot, so he's actually in worse shape than me not being able to hold utensils to eat with.

Accidents can happen at any age to Doomers and Mountain Men, but of course the longer you are out there and the older you get, it's only a matter of time before statistics catch up with you.  Thus, even though H-Gs had generally healthier diets than their Ag competitors,, their average lifespans were shorter, around age 45 was doing good for an H-G.

However, buying your ticket to the Great Beyond like Hatchet Jack and leaving your .50 cal Hawkins rifle to whoever thar finds you lord hopes its a white man s about as good a way to go out as any, right?  3 minutes into this clip from Jeremiah Johnson.


RE

Quote from: RE on Oct 07, 2023, 02:32 AMSounds like a really bad and very frightening episode.  Can I ask how old you actually are?

RE

I prefer not to be specific as I know data collection/profilling is a thing on these here interwebs, I will just say greater than 60, I get the seniors discount everywhere. I just could not spring away fast enough when I seen things going pear shaped. Now in retrospective I should have seen that this tree would be more problematic being bent much like a banana.

Quote from: Knarf on Oct 07, 2023, 06:51 AMWOW!! I am glad you survived that ordeal. We too are too old and feeble to cut our wood supply from our forest. We now have it delivered at about $300 a cord.

Yes, buying it is not to costly, I had to remove these trees for more than fire wood reasons, they had become so tall they were blocking my solar panels when the sun is sitting low on the horizon in winter. I am so glad I built up a supply of pain meds. No way I would be able to get in my truck let alone drive to a pharmacy to fill a prescription.
I was barely able to get to the hospital last night, and they bumped me full of morphine before I left, without that hit I don't think I would have made it back home. Now everything is so swollen up I don't know if I can make it to the bathroom. I suspect I will find out soon.

I am so glad I had built a ramp years ago for getting onto the deck. Without that ramp I would not have been able to get in my home (upstairs part) last night.

Quote from: 18hammers on Oct 07, 2023, 01:23 PMI prefer not to be specific as I know data collection/profilling is a thing on these here interwebs, I will just say greater than 60, I get the seniors discount everywhere. I just could not spring away fast enough when I seen things going pear shaped. Now in retrospective I should have seen that this tree would be more problematic being bent much like a banana.

Although I sympathize with your attempt to avoid data collection and profiling, as long as you pay your ISP with a credit card to provide your internet service, your data and profile is already in the Google database,Amazon has it, the NSA has it, MI6 has it, the Mossad has it, the KGB has it, the Chinese MSS has it...

The horse left the barn quite some time back.  Compared to the people you really have to worry about, a bunch of aging net addicts  and kollapsniks pose very little threat to your security.  I hope I don't scare you off, but if you post on any website, the Admin can find out who you are and where you are posting from.  Your IP address is attached to every post you make.  Anonymity on the net is a total fiction.  Both K-Dog and myself are quite well known by the aforementioned state security  and data collection agencies, both our websites have been subjected to endless disinformation by paid trolls, and we in turn have nailed them down and routed them out.  And we know what we are doing on the net, I am a long time user going back to the early days of the arpanet before the internet, world wide web, www address prefix,and K-Dog is a code jockey, an electrical engineer with even more capability than me to find this information out.  I just ask out of courtesy, and only ever try to ascertain someone's true identity if he/she poses a threat or disrupts my website, which you do not.

Just to let you know my real name is John Litter, my birthdate is 8/31/1957, I live in Anchorage, Alaska and I recently turned 66 years old.     Miraculously I might add, when I began writing on collapse and founded the original Doomstead Diner, I never thought I would stay above ground anywhere near this long, I figured to be dead before I turned 60. My RE is Dying threads go back to I think 2013 maybe earlier.  I even had my own Tombstone custom carved from granite sourced in quarries as far away as India & China, and planted in a Springfield, MO cemetery as a monument to the Collapse of Industrial Civilization.  It waits for my meat package to be shipped back there when I buy my ticket to the Great Beyond, if there is still a  plane or boat that will ship it there at a price I still have left in my estate to pay, which is unlikely at this point.  Even if my corpse doesn't get there, the stones do have embedded in them copies of my DNA, photographs and short biography on paper, and many of the articles I had written prior to final assembly of the monument. 

You can visit the monument after I join my ancestors around the campfire of my people, and I bestow on K-Dog the job of organizing the Wake, if not IRL at the gravesite, at least in cyberspace if the net is still functioning.

Below are videos I made, featuring the monument completion and placement a few years back.




Here's a bonus video featuring K-Dog and myself with Kollapsnik pals Profs Ugo Bardi and George Mobus discussing the Coronavirus problem at its peak.


Many more great vids still up on the Doomstead Diner YouTube Channel, FREE so it's still available.

https://www.youtube.com/@DoomsteadDiner

RE

I have no illusion of privacy and am aware of alphabet agencies being all knowing, it is more the data harvesting for commercial ad targeting, the demographic profiling for sales purposes that I "try" not to aid. 

About 4 years ago I bought a pair of crutches at value village for no reason other than they were cheap. They just sat in the carport all this time. I sure needed them last night. By the time I made it back to the house I could hardly stand. I think all the swelling has peaked, tomorrow should be better.

Quote from: 18hammers on Oct 07, 2023, 09:40 PMI have no illusion of privacy and am aware of alphabet agencies being all knowing, it is more the data harvesting for commercial ad targeting, the demographic profiling for sales purposes that I "try" not to aid. 

Also a reasonable desire, except that anyone interested in commercial ad targeting and demographic data mining of a website like this one or the original Doomstead Diner would end up bankrupt, 1st because there is practically nobody reading it, 2nd because the average age demographic comes in only slightly younger than the already dead and no longer a potential consumer of their product, 3rd because the majority of the few readers our websites attract have little disposable income to waste on the junk they are trying to sell, and 4th that our leftist and rabidly anti-capitalist spin means no matter what product they want to sell, we wouldn't buy it just on principle. lol

If after applying their best and most advanced AI filters and cross matching subroutines to our posts, the products they come up with would undubtedly be (and are, because they are the ads I consistently see pop up on my screen) really cool Dooomstead, Survival, communications and self defense gear you otherwise would not have found with your own really slow google searches of the millions of possible  items and suppliers...well, that's GREAT!  ROFLMAOPIMP.  At last, an application of the network that is useful to me! 

RE

Finally a day with less pain and less swelling. I have turned the corner. Have a doctor apt of the 19th, will see where I am at then. I am no stranger to trauma, been in enough truck accidents to know how the body works to protect itself. Hunger becomes little, the bowels shut down, breathing is shallow and the whole body wants to rest. I have become skilled with crutches. There will be no more cutting firewood this year, I wont get new grease into the turbine bearings this fall. Lots wont get done before the snow falls, such is life.

It is a week since the accident, If I can I am going to hobble outside and see if I can make it to the crime scene, just for a look, to better understand how I fucked up.

Quote from: Knarf on Oct 14, 2023, 05:10 AM"When life throws us lemons, we can make lemonade." Just be sure to add 4 cups of sugar per gallon! I am glad you are mobile. Can you walk/scoot upright?

  The best pain medication I use is Kratom. Have you heard of it? It is ground/processed leaves from a tree that mainly grows in Indonesia and neighboring countries. It is a crime to process it in some US states. It is legal in Canada. I don't tell my Doctor that I am using it. The Government and the Medical industry don't want it legalized. They use misinformation propaganda to demonize it. There are millions of users in the states that have a shared saying..."It saved my life." I dove deep into finding the truth about it to avoid RX pain meds. If you get interested in it we could make it a subject here, if K-Dog feels it will not draw unwanted attention.

  When you get to "scene of the mishap" I would think you will be a lot better off than you were, lying there, pinned by the tree, and in shock ( glad you didn't faint ).

I have not heard of it, I will check it out though. I had a few Morphine Sulfate pills and a few Cyclobenzaprine to help with the pain. I used them up fast and then only had Tylenol #1 after that. I wish I could have stayed in the hospital for 6 days and been kept in a comma until the swelling stopped, it was that bad. I had no idea skin could stretch so much without bursting. Yes, I can be upright with the help of crutches and hobble around ok now. I know I am lucky, It could have gone much worse.I hope in a few more days I can get around without crutches.

Quote from: 18hammers on Oct 15, 2023, 09:02 PMI have not heard of it, I will check it out though. I had a few Morphine Sulfate pills and a few Cyclobenzaprine to help with the pain. I used them up fast and then only had Tylenol #1 after that. I wish I could have stayed in the hospital for 6 days and been kept in a comma until the swelling stopped, it was that bad. I had no idea skin could stretch so much without bursting. Yes, I can be upright with the help of crutches and hobble around ok now. I know I am lucky, It could have gone much worse.I hope in a few more days I can get around without crutches.

Unfortunately, they won't keep you anaethitized into a comatose state like an anaesthesiologist does during surgery to keep you obliviouus to pain for more than a few hours, a day at the most.  You have to be constantly monitored or you can easily be overdosed and never wake up.  During my worst 3 months prior to the amputation of my right leg (which had gone septic and they were trying to close the wound) I got 20 mg oral morphine every 4 hours, and when it was really bad, an IV drip of a 5% morphine solution on top of that.  That does a good enough job of dulling the pain so it's tolerable, but you are not unconscious.

They sent me home with a bottle of 120 10 mg Percocets, which have 10 mg oxycodone together with 325 mg tylenol as a 1 month supply, 4/day.  After a month or so I decided to go cold turkey and stop altogether instead of weening off it, and had a hellacious 2 week long withdrawal.  I stayed off pain meds for a couple of years after that, basically just learning to compartmentalize it and live with it, since they make it a real pain in the ass nowadays to renew your narc prescription.  Your regular PCP (Primary Care Physician} won't do it, due to licensing and malpractice issues.

After getting sick again with a new case of cellulitis which caused my remaining leg to blow up to the size of the Hindenberg, I got put on oxycodone again at the hospital.  After a cuple of months here at the SNIF, the suprvising doctor would not sign off on the order to keep it coming, so now I have to go every month to a Pain Clinic, where I chat with the Pain Doc about where it hurts and the type of pain, and we chit chat about what meds are available and how to juggle them around.  Don't take too much Tylenol BTW, it's bad for your liver.  Right now I added Lyrica which is a ind of nerve blocker and use 7.5mg Percocets 4X day as well.  This is fine at the moment, and I am making no attempt at getting off it.  I get a ride once a month to the clinic, the doc signs off  on anther order, and they ship up the pills from the corporate pharmacy in the lower 48.  Medicare covers the cost, no clue how much the pills cost each month.

Pain really sucks, and nobody ever can really know how bad yours is, because everybody has a different tolerance level for it, and different resistance to pain meds as well.  The longer you take narcs, the greater your tolerance gets, so to get the same effect, you need higher doses.  When you really need it though in the hospital, as long as you scream bloody murder nonstop for a few hours, eventually a doctor will write an order for some decent narcs.  They wanna make sure you are really serious about it and not just taking them for fun. lol.

RE