As I was taking my low dose, heart-protective (hopefully), aspirin dose last night, I had a flashback and remembered when today’s “low dose aspirin regimen” was called something else – “baby aspirin!!”.
There are many markers for how old a person is. One of them is remembering when we used to treat babies with St. Joseph’s Children’s Aspirin—those little, sweet, orange pills that seemed almost like candy. We thought we were doing something healthy, something protective. I even have a faint memory of my mother treating me with that miracle fever reducer. Even as relatively recently as when I began my career as a pediatrician in the late 70s, aspirin was still widely given to children with fevers. It was shortly thereafter, though, that we began to recognize the dangerous link between aspirin use in kids and Reye’s Syndrome, a rare but often deadly illness. Once tragically common, Reye’s Syndrome has now all but disappeared, thanks to no longer giving aspirin to kids. (Okay, I know the late 70s may not fit your idea of “relatively recently,” but that’s sort of the point of a piece on aging.)
For me, and for anyone who remembers aspirin going from good for kids to bad for kids, it’s a powerful marker of time passed and of how medicine evolves…but also how we can measure old age not only in birthdays but in the memories of practices we’ve left behind.
Remember when we rode in cars without seat belts, sprawled out in the back of station wagons, sometimes even lying on the little fold-down bench that faced backward. When we smeared on suntan oil instead of sunscreen, chasing tans instead of worrying about skin cancer. When we played outside until dark with no cell phones to track us, and our parents had no GPS pins to follow, just a vague sense that we’d come home when the streetlights flicked on and our bellies told us it was dinner time.
These aren’t just quaint memories; they’re cultural timestamps. Each one tells us something about how far we’ve come in safety, science, and social norms. And each one reminds us that the practices we take for granted today will surely be looked back at by today’s young adults with the realization that we weren’t nearly as advanced as we thought. We’ll shake our heads at surgery, for example. We’ll say to our kids, “Back in the day we used knives to remove tumors and bypass clogged blood vessels!” “Knives? Are you serious?” they’ll say to us. “Are you really that old?”
It’s okay, kids. It’s not that we’re just old. We’re also living witnesses to the evolving story of humanity.
