It’s a little silly, but my natural ageing is pathologized–post impairment syndrome. I was a Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS) level II at peak, became a III, and am now a IV on most days, but can do stairs with a railing, so I say IV/III, yeah.
The biggest difference between a GMFCS IV and V is that a 5 cannot hold themselves up against gravity, whereas a 4 often can.
Do not let fear of losing gross motor function discourage you from doing neurorehabilitation or seeking out surgical procedures. I had a single multi-level event surgery on 21 November 2005. At some point in 2006, my physiotherapist told my father I’d reached max medical improvement, and he came close to murdering me. He even was thinking about killing me before he died. But I did homicidal risk assessment throughout the last few weeks of his life and conclused consistently that he was a medium to low risk. Now that he’s dead, of course, there’s zero risk of him murdering me. Good psychiatric management has been manualised for borderlines, but not psychopaths. Although I am not going to write a couple books on this at this point in my life, I did write a one-page summary.
Dementia is not normal aging. The Better Health While Aging vlog is critical in understanding and supporting geriatric patients.
Tennessee Williams has a hot tip on how to look years younger in less than one minute, though!
Vale.
Updated: 2025 July 20