We lived in San Diego in part to escape my wife's family issues.
Depending on the position of the tide, this, running on the beach, can create large stresses on one's knees and hips.
As an old man I feel it, and I do take an NSAID to manage it, aspirin. I often remark that if aspirin were discovered today, rather than a century ago, it would be a prescription item - if it managed to get through clinical trials, which it might not do - and would be making some pharmaceutical company billions upon billions of dollars, at least until it went generic.
I personally think that aspirin a great drug, with known effects, including COX-2, to suppress certain cancers, the prevention of heart attacks and strokes.
It is inhibitor of two cyclooxgenases, COX-1 and COX-2, the latter being involved with inflammation and pain, the former with blood clotting.
The theory behind the COX-2 inhibitors like Celebrex and Vioxx was that they were designed to reduce pain and inflammation without inhibiting COX-1, responsible for one of aspirin's side effects, bleeding. It certainly sounded good at the time.
However, there is a fine line between antagonist and agonist and it appears that instead of being a COX-1 antagonist, or being COX-1 neutral, for some set of the population it was an agonist and caused clotting and heart attacks.
Merck was working on a successor to Vioxx, and the drug had interesting chemistry, using a chemistry related to modern "ionic liquid" chemistry that was quite challenging, since it required the use of Hastelloy reactors. Happily, as it turned out for me, the company I was working for at the time did not have these reactors, so I wasn't involved. But I could have been...
A few years back, my new doctor switched my statin. The side effects left me in great pain. I stopped taking it, even though I know statins are generally good for you. I'm going to ask to go back to the old one.
I am lucky because I can read all the primary medicinal chemistry and medical journals, so I understand what I take. I also have a very strong background in medicinal chemistry. No drug is really "safe," for everyone; all have risks, including aspirin, very much so.
I know something about inner city schools. My wife attended one, even though her father was well off - he was a doctor - he moved to a small wealthy enclave surrounded by areas of poverty. In high school, my wife was afraid to go to the bathroom, having been attacked in it and often having to step over used syringes in the stalls. She volunteered in the math office so she could use the faculty bathroom. (Her sisters went to private schools.)
I have a sense of how difficult your job must have been, crappy, mutilated textbooks, violence in the hallways, and so on. I went to a good high school for its time; we lived "on the poor side of the tracks" in a wealthy district.
My wife won the high school's physics award, and was admitted to a pretty good university as a physics major, which is where she met me; I was a chemistry major. The minute I met her and learned that she was a physics major, I decided then and there that I would marry her some day. All the other nerds on campus besides me thought the same thing. She had a certain "look" that made men sort of wild, and after she flipped me off on multiple occasions, we became friends in spite of that and used to go to art galleries and stuff. Later we went from friends to lovers, and later we married and spent many delicious years together until we were ready to become parents.
However the poor quality of her high school education, and a healthy dose of parental neglect and the "Cinderella syndrome" among her sisters and mother, prevented her from doing well in physics, and she went on to do other things.
She invested a lot of time and love in my boys when we decided to have children; and while I take great pride in their academic success, most of it comes from her. There are some parents - my own father was such a parent - who work hard to avoid being their parent(s) by doing everything their parents didn't do.
My wife was such a person, and my boys show it. She made sure she got the emotional, material and intellectual support they needed to realize their potential, and they are doing so. She arranged the visits to science museums, art galleries, trips into nature. Unlike her parents, she engaged her children, turned off the TV, talked with them, and brought our family through some difficult times.
One son is an artist - an excellent artist, if high strung - the other is becoming an excellent scientist, if a somewhat subdued and understated one.
My time is almost over, I think, but I have loved my life, since my life began, which it did when I met my wife. Not everything was perfect, but many things were. I'm a lucky guy, hips and knees notwithstanding.
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