Elderly Ailment Rambling

Max Goldman: My lumbago is killing me.
John Gustafson: Killing you, my ass. He doesn't know the meaning of the word pain. I've got a pinched sciatica that makes your lumbago look like eyestrain.
Max Goldman: Pain... he wants to talk about pain? I had a gallstone the size of a baseball.
John Gustafson: Gallstone? Yeah, gallstones are for pussies. When I had shingles, did you see me in here complaining, huh?
Max Goldman: Shingles, shmingles. When I had my ulcers, I was... farting razor blades.

— Grumpy Old Men

In works of fiction, the elderly are all too eager to share every last ailment, malady, illness, or surgery they've had within the last six months. Sometimes without prompting at all. And strangely enough, they're equally likely to do so enthusiastically and with gusto as they are to do so with a high degree of self-pity.

This trope tends to be gender-neutral, with both men and women who are advanced in years able to participate. And even whether it is delivered with zeal or sadness is divided fairly evenly between the sexes.

You see someone you know and go to greet them. You ask them how they're doing, and expect the prescribed social response of "Oh, fine. Just fine." However, this isn't always the case. Due to age and cultural differences, there are many occasions, particularly in humorous works, when someone may tell you far more than you wanted to hear.

For the purposes of this trope, "elderly" will be defined as age 50 and above, the point when most age-related maladies really begin to take hold.

Expect Alter Kockers to be all too ready to engage in this sort of behavior, owing to various stereotypes.

Compare, and can overlap with, Misery Poker, which often (but not always) involves two old people doing this to each other.

Subtrope of Too Much Information. Compare Rambling Old Man Monologue and Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!

And for the sake of everyone's sanity, No Real Life Examples, Please!.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Lou!: Lou's grandmother sometimes casually talks about her varicose problems to people not at all willing to hear about them, including once at a dinner table.

Comic Strips

• In Viz, "Mrs. Brady, Old Lady" is constantly going on in disgusting detail about her digestive and gynaecological problems.

Films — Live-Action

• Babe: As in the book it's based upon, Maa the elderly ewe complains to Babe about her cough and her lame leg.
• Clerks: An elderly man convinces Dante to let him use the "Employees Only" restroom by stating that at his age, he didn't always make it in time. He convinced him to let him take a roll of high-end toilet paper by stating that the cheap stuff would really "knock his hemorrhoids around". And the porno mag was just because the drawings "made him laugh" (at which point Dante was pretty much just trying to get rid of the guy).
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation: When Clark and Ellen's parents arrive for the big family Christmas, the Griswolds are "treated" to a chorus of complaints about spinal taps, moles, and hemorrhoids.
• The Room (2003): At one point, Lisa's mother, Claudette, declares out of nowhere, "I got the results of the test back — I definitely have breast cancer." This is never mentioned again.
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: Invoked by McCoy when he and Kirk are on trial for murdering Chancellor Gorkon, and he's asked about his medical standing. He replies, "Aside from a touch of arthritis, I'd say pretty good." His effort at levity actually does get one Klingon to laugh.

Literature

• Big Nate: Coach John is old enough to be of retirement age, and according to Nate, he often talks about his knee surgeries ("And the bone was poking through the skin!") and has shown off his kidney stone collection.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • In The Ugly Truth, Greg's great-grandmother Gammie gives him "the talk" about how he should enjoy his childhood and not rush to grow up. She mentions that getting to be her age isn't fun, and starts talking about hemorrhoids and shingles. When she starts rolling down a sock to show him, he quickly leaves the room.
  • In one book, Greg pranks his great-grandmother with a Whoopee Cushion, but she doesn't feel it and thinks she genuinely farted. In her apology note, she claims to have had "trouble controlling her body" and wonders if her recent surgery had given her gas.
  • In Dog Days, Greg tries to write a newspaper comic named "Hey, People!" a blatant Author Tract where he complains about other people's habits that he finds gross. One strip depicts him overhearing an old man loudly discussing his ingrown toenail surgery while at a restaurant.
• Discworld: According to Lu-Tze's Diary of Enlightenment, an essential part of the Way of Mrs Cosmopolite (a philosophy based on turning "the things old ladies say" into Zen koans) is that you should always have some persistent ailment that you raise at the slightest provocation, such as "It's my foot." You should also be prepared for others to do likewise, with a store of stories about someone who had the same thing they did, and either it went away on its own or they died.
• In My Family and Other Animals, Gerald's mom takes in an elderly woman named Lugaretzia to work in her house. The only thing that makes her happy is discussing her ailments. At first, she describes her stomach pains in detail. Then, they get better, but her legs start hurting. Larry takes to eating in his room after Lugaretzia takes off her shoes in the dining room to point out where it hurts.
  There was only one thing in life that could bring a smile to Lugaretzia's gloomy countenance, a glint to her spaniel eyes, and that was a discussion of her ailments. Where most people are hypochondriacs as a hobby, Lugaretzia had turned it into a full-time occupation. When we took up residence it was her stomach that was worrying her. Bulletins on the state of her stomach would start at seven in the morning when she brought up the tea. She would move from room to room with the trays, giving each one of us a blow-by-blow account of her nightly bout with her insides. She was a master of the art of graphic description; groaning, gasping, doubling up in agony, stamping about the rooms, she would give us such a realistic picture of her suffering that we would find our own stomachs aching in sympathy.
• The Sheep Pig: Maa is an elderly sheep who complains to Babe the pig about her lame leg and her cough.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Bang Theory: Mrs. Wolowitz, during her life, was often eager to share the latest test results from a doctor's appointment, discuss surgeries she'd had, or ailments she was suffering. Often times to the disgust of her son, Howard. She would also often use it for the purposes of sending her son on a guilt trip if she felt he'd been neglecting her.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Norm Scully, who is close to retirement, has a habit of going into way too much detail about his various medical problems and ailments, much to the disgust of the rest of the squad.
• Castle: An investigation into the murder of a bail bondsman leads the crew to an aged ex-con named Clifford Stucky, who meets Ryan and Esposito at the door of his apartment by informing them that they'll have to speak up, as he just dropped his hearing aid in the toilet. And at the precinct, where he's answering questions about the suspect breaking into his apartment, he gleefully informs Castle that his prostate is about the size of a baby's fist, helpfully demonstrating.
• CSI: NY: Lindsay is getting ready to go on maternity leave in "Green Piece". Sid, who's over 50, equates his own ailments with her symptoms:
  Sid: So, how's it feel? It's your last case, right? And then off to Montana.
  Lindsay: It feels pretty good.
  Sid: Oh, I bet it does. No bodies at 3 a.m. No double shifts with no sleep, a slice of pizza on the run.
  Lindsay: Constipation, swelling of the feet, help getting up from a chair, constant urination. Wanna switch?
  Sid: Oh, I already have all of that. I just want the time off.
• iCarly: In "iBeat the Heat", an old man tells Carly unprompted that he suffers from angina.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Scientific Method", a group of aliens experiment on the crew. Chakotay is artificially aged. He's stuck in Sickbay along with Neelix, both complaining about their ailments to each other. Chakotay goes bald, his eyesight is failing, and he has severe arthritis.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street: One cartoon skit consists entirely of an old man narrating a time he had the flu. He mentions that "all [he] wanted to do was stay in the sack", his mouth was dry, and he even thought he might die.

Video Games

• In the first three Ace Attorney games, Marvin Grossberg is an elderly attorney who is prone to updating the characters about how his hemorrhoids are doing at any given moment.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: The vaguely middle-aged Coach Z apparently has a bad habit of talking about his "embarrassing physical problems".
  Coach Z: And my back still hurts, and my knees still hurt, and my head still hurts...

Web Videos

• In this parody of "The Cell Block Tango" using characters from The Addams Family, Grandmama mentions in her verse that she has shingles, arthritis, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, urinary incontinence, IBS, rabies, bird flu, glass lungs, headlice, mad cow disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, tapeworms, fungal meningitis, cholera, and measles.
• Kitboga, a scambaiter who is popular on Twitch and YouTube, often does this when playing his elderly characters (like Granny Edna) in order to make the scammer uncomfortable while also wasting their time.

Western Animation

• An episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius has Jimmy's grandma babysit him whilst his parents are away, and promptly spend the whole time yammering about her various ailments, to the point that Jimmy is able to slip away by setting up a cardboard standee of himself. He eventually gets the idea to spike her "tongue-de-furrer" with a chemical to make her young in the hope that she'll complain less. It works a little too well and ends up turning her into a baby.
• Futurama: Professor Farnsworth, who's a man of 160, has a tendency to talk about his medical conditions:
  • In one episode, he's telling a story about the past and mentions that he had diarrhea back then even though it's completely unrelated to the matter at hand.
  • In "I Second That Emotion", when Nibbler is flushed down the toilet and everyone thinks he died, Farnsworth's eulogy for him is that he's "gone to a place where I too hope one day to go: the toilet" (implying he's constipated or incontinent).
  • In "Mother's Day", he casually mentions that the time his ex-girlfriend (a psycho woman known as "Mom") "broke his heart" was "four or five hearts ago", implying he's had replacement hearts.
  • In "That's Lobstertainment!", the Professor mentions that he's been a fan of Harold Zoid since back when his hips were made of bone.
  • Inverted in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles": When Farnsworth is exposed to anti-aging tar at a spa, his younger self complains about his digestive system working properly:
    Farnsworth: The devil take this predictable colon!
• Grossology: Parodied in "Oldie But a Goodie". Lance Boil created a pus that caused Rapid Aging. At the end of the episode, Abby and Lance both fall over in it and immediately start complaining to each other about their conditions, much to Ty's disgust.
• Martha Speaks: In "Grandpa Bernie Cleans Up", an Old Dog named Candy complains that she's too "achy" to dig or play due to her old age.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Itchy and Stratchy: The Movie" features a trailer for Star Trek XII: So Very Tired which opens on a very old Captain Kirk making a list of complaints:
    "Captain's log, Stardate 6051. Had trouble sleeping last night. My hiatal hernia is acting up. The ship is drafty and damp. I complain, but nobody listens."
  • In "The Devil Wears Nada", the supervisor of Sector 7G retires, and Mr. Burns announces that, "much as what was formerly my kidney is now my heart", he's promoting his replacement from within.
  • In one Butterfinger commercial, Grampa gets woken up by a loud crunch and tells Lisa to stop biting her Butterfinger bar. When she tells him she isn't eating it, he mutters "Darn osteoporosis".

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