Needing a cane. I’m not even that old, barely 50, but I’ve been on a cane as a necessity for almost twenty years now. The early part of that was spotty, after I had enough physical therapy to get off of a walker entirely, I slowly got to the point where I could skip the cane for most things while I tried going back to work.
That utterly failed lol. By 2008, it was pretty much mandatory anywhere but home, and over the years moved to being anywhere outside the house at all, with some days where it’s inside too.
Kinda crazy looking back on it because now it seems like I’ve been in this situation my entire life, but it also doesn’t feel like twenty years. Which, it isn’t quite 20 yet, but IDGAF about precision on this lol.
But back as a kid, I always thought of canes as being for really old people. I kinda knew it wasn’t only for old people, but the concept of it was like that.
Arthritis is the other one. I had no idea until it started up in my hands in my twenties that arthritis wasn’t purely for people older than that. I’d never run into it, and had somehow also never read about it. But rheumatoid arthritis isn’t ageist, it turns out.