Lee Kuan Yew on Ageing....part 2

I think the most important thing in ageing is you got to understand yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn't there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.
But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me was one day, when I said: 'Look, I'm feeling slower and sluggish.' So he gave me a medical encyclopaedia and he turned the pages to ageing.

I read it up and it was illuminating.
A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.
As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically.

Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don't know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output is when they're in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven't lost many neurons.
That's what they tell me. So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It's just common sense.
I never planned to live till 85 or 84. I just didn't think about it.
I said: 'Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.
My father died when he was 94.'
But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA.

But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy.
He was working for the Shell company. He was in charge, he was a superintendent of an oil depot. When he retired, he started becoming a salesman..
So people used to tell me: 'Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.' My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins. And he keeps going.
But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.
Thereafter, he couldn't go back to swimming.
Then he became wheelchair-bound.
Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way.
So my brother - who's a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house - took him in.
And he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.

So my calculations, I'm somewhere between 74 and 94. And I've reached the halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it's got to do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, 'Come tomorrow'. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: 'Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.' I said: 'What's that?' He said: 'We'll pump something in and we'll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.'

I was going to go home. But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: 'What are you doing here?'
I said: 'I've got this.'
He said: 'Don't go home. You stay here tonight.
I've sent patients home and they never came back. Just stay here.
They'll put you on the monitor. They'll watch your heart.
And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre.
You go home. You've got no such monitor. You may never come back.'

So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that's lucky for me.
Two weeks later, I was walking around,I felt it's coming back.
Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: 'We'll put in a stent.'
I'm one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent.
He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other.
So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation.
He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that's that. That was before all this problem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn't occlude and create a disturbance.