Forever Young

Plagued by too many aches and pains to count, Catherine Hong ditched her family and flew to a longevity retreat in Arizona. Here, her dispatch from the desert.

- SAMANTHA MASH

“Gradually and then suddenly” is how a Hemingway character once described how he went bankrupt. But over the past year, whenever I found myself awake at night, wondering how I had gone from being a normal, healthy person to an aching bag of bones, this was the phrase that kept coming to mind.

Basically, this is how it went: I was healthy as a horse for the first 30 years of my life. Then, for the next two decades—for ease, let’s just call these the child-rearing years—I focused more on my kids’ doctor appointments than my own. During this period, my well-being gradually slid downhill, but it happened so slowly that I hardly noticed. And then, boom. I turned 50, and whatever was supposed to hold my bones and muscles together seemed to crumble. I became a walking collection of complaints, with chronic pain in my right shoulder, left arm, left hip, and the last two fingers of each hand.

I began going to specialists as if it were a part-time job. Orthopedic surgeons, physiatrists, an endocrinologist, a rheumatologist, and a pain specialist—everybody had a different diagnosis and a different solution. I tried physical therapy, acupuncture, injections, and anti-inflammatories, all to little effect. I invested in an expensive standing desk, a souped-up ergonomic desk chair, CBD oils and balms, THC gummies, a heating pad, a massage gun, and as many actual massages as I could stand to pay for. My freezer was hard to shut because it was jammed with so many therapeutic ice packs. Hormone therapy and pilates helped to some degree, but when it still hurts so much to rotate your car’s steering wheel that you try to avoid making left turns, does it really count as improvement?