I think I knew what was happening even before my head bounced off the hard kitchen counter on its way to the even harder stone floor. I was rapidly losing my connection with reality. My wife, Tabitha, later estimated that I was out for 10...
Somehow we're squeezing 16 people into our apartment for Thanksgiving this year, with relatives ranging in age from my 30-year-old nephew to my 90-year-old mother. I love them all, but in a way the one I know best is the middle-aged man across the table...
For humans, life isn't nearly as short as it is for other primates, whose minds and bodies start to deteriorate around the time they reach the end of their reproductive years. Once an animal has created offspring, it has done the heavy lifting of evolution. We,...
The payment methods most favored by con artists because they are hard to trace — and which make it difficult for consumers to recover their money — will be prohibited for all telemarketers, thanks to new requirements by the Federal Trade Commission aimed at curbing financial...
Two years ago my mom fell at home and ended up being admitted to the ICU with four broken ribs and internal injuries. She was lucky. After two weeks in the hospital and a few more in a rehab unit she was back home, using...
If you follow health news, by now you may have heard about a federally funded study that was stopped early because of impressive evidence that aggressively lowering blood pressure saves lives. For more than half a century we've known that controlling blood pressure (getting the numbers...
Harriet Kelly has one word to describe the day she stopped driving four years ago: miserable. "It's no fun when you give up driving," she says. "I just have to say that." Kelly, who lives in Denver, says she was in her 80s when she noticed her...
From his roles in Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the Dick Van Dyke Show and, most recently, the Night at the Museum movies, actor Dick Van Dyke has been in our collective consciousness for a very long time. Though he seems to be...
Along about the time I became a great-grandmother I dyed my white hair blue. Not a wussy "blue-rinse" blue, but eye-stabbing, punk-kid blue. At the time, I didn't do any soul-searching. I just thought, What the hell, why not? I was surprised by how this turn...
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force now says all overweight and obese Americans between 40 and 70 years old should get their blood sugar levels tested. The advisory group's previous recommendation, drafted in 2008, made no mention of weight, instead suggesting that doctors routinely test the...