To wonder how my Aunty Margaret is still alive?

[Marie2023]

My Aunty Margaret has just turned 70. She’s 15 years older than me and all the time I’ve known her she has been an alcoholic. She hasn’t been invited to any family gatherings since the 90s because she always gets drunk, causes a scene and ruins the event. She hasn’t had a job for years but has a partner who looks after her financially.

Aunty Margaret currently drinks a litre bottle of vodka during the day and more drinks when her partner gets home from work. She also smokes around 60 cigarettes a day. She rarely eats and is stick thin.

Recently Margaret wasn’t feeling very well so her partner took her to the doctor. The doctor ordered some tests which came back fine. His summary of the situation was: “Margaret is as fit as a fiddle, although should probably consider drinking and smoking a bit less.”

🤔

I am honestly amazed she’s still alive, let alone “fit as a fiddle”. Why is it that some people can abuse themselves like that for years with no consequences?

Genetics and luck. An in law to the greater family had a mother who was an alcoholic when they were a child, right through to the day she died in her 90’s. Wasn’t a great life though, she basically only really went out to get booze and spent the rest of her time alone in her apartment and passed out around lunch. She would never come to any family events but I visited a few times with relatives. You had to go and be out by morning tea to have any conversation with her. It was a long life but seems a shit one.

My similar family story... Grandad lived off Frey bentos pies, cups of tea and tinned fruit (these days would be diagnosed with AFRID) with a roast dinner on a Sunday. Made it to 90. Smoked until he was late 70's then just gave it up.

No regular exercise, absolutely no fads or health conscious regimes. Actually died from pneumonia in the end but a peaceful quiet death.

My mum did this all through my life till the day she died. She left my dad and was on purely a state pension plus her HA rent paid. At current prices, her 60 Silk Cut a day would cost £46.05 per day, x 7 days £322.35.
State pension plus pension credit is £182.60
She sold everything she had of any value, never ate, and would not come to visit me as I wouldn't let her smoke in the house with my 4 children.
Her cigarettes were more important than anything.

Do you know that the doctor did actually tell her she's "as fit as a fiddle" though or is that just the story she's telling everyone?

I know a few folk who drink heavily and are obese/morbidly obese who tell everyone that the GP told them they are type 2 diabetic as well as needing to lose weight but "the GP is talking a load of rubbish ". They are totally in denial as they refuse to give up or cut down on alcohol and poor diet. One of them drinks 2 bottles of red wine a day and smokes. They struggle to walk which they put down to arthritis (nothing to do with being morbidity obese then?) their breathing is so heavy you can hear them coming before you see them and apparently their liver function is fine. During Covid they were on a plane abroad as soon as they were allowed and with no mask as soon as that was permitted too. They are clearly totally in denial about their health issues and the GP is wrong. They're mid 60's and I'm amazed they've lasted that long.

Some of it is generics and just luck. My mil is incredibly healthy, exercises, eats well etc but has dangerously high cholesterol. My dad is morbidly obese, older and has perfect cholesterol. It’s quite mysterious how our bodies can work so differently.

Luck, genes, etc.

Being a heavy smoker/heavy drinker "increases" your risks, but doesn't guarantee future health problems. Lots of them still live healthily to a ripe old age!

The opposite applies too! Just like my OH who has never smoked, never drank, fit, normal weight, never used drugs, etc., who was diagnosed with an incurable cancer in his early 50s - one of those cancers with no known cause!

It's all a numbers game and probability. You can increase/reduce your risks, but as with all probabilities, there are exceptions to the norm!

This made me laugh.....you cannot possibly be doing funerals for healthier people....most healthy people aren't dead.

Me too, and although I'd never encourage alcoholism or smoking around other people, i do think we hsould live as we choose and go when we're ready. I don;t really understand living abstemiously just to prolong life. Live as you want to live and take the chances.

I had a granny a bit like this. Drank and smoked like hell and lived well into her eighties. She didn't have a good diet either but was very skinny and walked everywhere.

I heard an expert on the radio talking about this and he said there is a very slim chance that long-term heavy drinking won't have any ill effects on a person, but it does happen, rarely. He didn't discuss smoking and I imagine it could be the same for that? The vast majority of people will get something awful, but the very odd person won't.

Why is it that some people can abuse themselves like that for years with no consequences?

This sounds like you are blaming her, suggesting her serious addictions are down to choice. She isn't abusing herself, she is most seriously unwell, despite her physical 'fitness'. The consequences of being addicted to alcohol are not minimal. She has suffered consequences for as long as this has controlled her. Just because you can't see the consequences doesn't mean they are not there.

Chain smokers literally always have a fag on the go. In my first job, I had to work in a small office with a chain smoker. He'd go through 2 or 3 packets during the working day alone (8 hours), so that's 40-60 fags just at work. He'd literally light up another as soon as he stubbed one out.

When I was growing up I knew plenty of elderly people who lived on whiskey and bacon and lit one cigarette from another all day. It wasn't unusual then, and people had ashtrays like troughs on their kitchen and coffees tables.

Obviously some must have died of lung cancer in their 40s and 50s, but the ones who didn't lived to the same age as their more clean living contemporaries!

Probably means they lived a healthy life BEFORE they were struck down with an illness/disease, some of which are purely random and have no known cause, so you can't take precautions against them!

Genes and luck, I guess.

All of my grandparents made it into their 80s and 90s, despite three of them being lifelong heavy smokers.
One of my grand dads was told aged 89 he had cancer and should probably give up smoking. He said ‘something had to get me in the end, so no I won’t’!’ and continued to smoke until he died a couple of months later in his sleep.

My Dad smokes heavily and is 75, but he does have emphysema, so not unscathed by his bad habits.

I felt the same about my grandad. He was an alcoholic for 60 plus years who ended his 'run" of drinking on bottles of rum a day and ended up in a respite home drying out for a week and "wanting to die" after one session of 4 bottles of wine, a small bottle of whiskey, and 2 bottles of rum in 24hrs. He then fell and broke his arm and noone would take it into him so he was without alcohol going forward as he wouldn't leave the house and no pub or shop was near his house.

He also abused paracetomal at the same time. He wa a prescribed it by the doctor and also had his own so he was taking the full doctor limit and then whatever he wanted on top. Over 100 boxes of just paracetomal was found around his house stashed at the end.

He was forever falling down drunk and cutting his head open and banging it off stuff. He ended up with dementia that he lived with once diagnosed (we know it was longer but his doctor refused to test him for a good couple of years ) for 8 years. He then had some fits (most likely due to the alcohol withdrawal but again his doctor wouldn't medicate him) over his last 5 or so years and one he was worked on by the paramedics for 40 mins to stabilse him and he ended up pretty much blind from it. He had crap genetics too.

He still lived to 88. Longer than his parents did (mother died when he was a toddler) and his siblings. Amazing.

There will always be some, smoking doesnt kill everybody, it only kills about half of smokers.

Alcoholism doesnt kill everybody, it only kills about 90% of alcoholics

So basically, 1 in every 20 people living like your aunt will dies from some other cause first, before the alcohol or smoking kills her

Yeah my mum is part of the other side of the statistics. Killed by smoking. My mum was barely in her 60s and her lungs were so so damaged. Her mum also died young due to lung damage.

This was my Grandma. She lived until she was 93 and then it was dementia that finally got her.

My other Grandma died at 71 having been teetotal and a non-smoker all her life.

It makes no sense at all to me.

It amazes me as well. There are a couple of local alcoholics, one male one female, who have been around for years and have looked at death’s door for most of that time yet there they are still walking (or hobbling) around town and I am always dumbfounded they are still here and still mobile (just, in one case) yet there are people who lead healthy lifestyles and get serious illnesses quite young. They must have some strong genes or a huge tolerance for alcohol.

Definitely luck of the draw sometimes. But look around you, visit a dementia nursing home, see all the poor unfortunate people who society won't allow to pass away peacefully and naturally, keep pumping drugs and medications into them, blue lighting them to hospital to spend hours of misery on a trolley, only to be medicated and sent back to an empty house or a care home for more misery.
How is this a good thing?

She may well be like my FIL, who was also a heavy smoking alcoholic. He was "fit as a fiddle" till he was 70, when he developed a sore throat which turned out to be fast-developing oesophageal cancer and died within weeks.

I do however agree with. @LakeTiticaca that living into old age isn't necessarily great. My mother's last ten years were utterly miserable due to gradually failing health and dementia, and she would have been very grateful to have gone by around the age of 80 at the latest.

I must admit that I have friends like these, like your Aunty Margaret.

It really depends on your outlook. I also have an Aunt is 87 and still drinks every day and smokes socially (as did my mother). We'll still stop off for a Martini or a G&T (or several) if we are out shopping, and don't see ourselves as 'alcoholic' although I'm aware we could possibly be viewed that way.

I think it all depends on how you were brought up. My grandfather (mother's side, French) was forever making cocktails, which was his great passion and hobby! I think a great deal of it is cultural and generational. The mainstays in my family life have always been food, the quality of it and ways and how to cook it, alcohol which we've always had with meals, and before and after for recreation and social reasons, cigarettes, cigars, etc - although that habit is diminishing as I think smoking is going out of fashion and becoming much harder to do socially.

For us, it's centered around the concept of living well (probably not aligned with today's idea of wellness).

I was really impressed when I visited my nephew in his university halls of residence and despite being a poor-ish student in the corner of his room was his cocktail shaker, bottles of gin, vermouth and Campari and lemons & olives, in order to offer us and his visitors, a Martini or a Negroni.

These little things can make life very pleasurable.

She doesn’t work and likely has low stress. It will catch up with her eventually. The drunks in my family eventually died. Cancer and an auto immune disease.

"The drunks in my family eventually died."

As, presumably, did the non-drunks.

Luck and genetics:

sister 1: ate carefully, exercised, very clean living,
sister 2: chain smokes, thinks a meal is half a slab of dairy milk, no exercise, lives in a polluted place

sister 1 is long dead (cancer)
sister 2 is happily smoking (no cancer) and nearly 80.