A 91-year-old patient told me today that she had a “different doctor for every part of my body.” She is active, lives independently, drives, does everything she wants, but spends too much time, she said, in doctors’ offices.

She lamented: “There is a ‘how to’ book on every subject under the sun, except on how to get old.” She asked me to write my next column on the subject. When I got home, I looked up the “how to” books and found one on everything from cryptocurrency to beekeeping, mahjong to SAT prep, algebra to raising goats. And yes, there were even a number of books on aging.

I have never thought much of “how to” books. They are too much like instruction manuals (which, in my family, we call the “destruction manual”). Instruction manuals are far more wordily complex than just looking and figuring it out — even bumbling through. I remember the night before my surgical rotation in med school; I tried to read the surgical manual on how to do an open appendectomy. I read about making the transverse incision through the epidermis and dermis but got disoriented when the manual talked about “opening the aponeurosis in a superolateral to inferomedial direction to expose the internal oblique muscle.” I thought I’d be in trouble, but as soon as my resident showed me on an anesthetized patient in the OR the next day, well, it made all the sense in the world. I suppose that’s why YouTube is so popular now. You can see how to do practically any procedure, from fixing your washing machine, to resecting a brain meningioma. Just recently, I learned most of how to build a stone pizza oven, although I couldn’t finish the video because someone else needed the toilet.

But watching someone age on a YouTube video? By the time you were done watching that person age, your own life would be pretty much done. (It’s like all these kids who spend so much time taking videos of their lives with GoPro cameras that they are either videotaping or watching what they videotaped. When do they ever have time to live?) So when it comes to aging, I figure it’s better to just bumble through. When things get rough, you can ask advice, but since you are older and know more, you take only that advice that makes sense because, let’s face it, your younger doctors and younger family members don’t really know what aging is like.

I saw another nonagenarian a bit later in the day. I know her well and told her I was thinking of writing about aging. She’s a lovely woman with a valve problem, atrial fibrillation, and is prone to leg swelling if she eats salty foods. Her biggest concern today was whether she could eat pizza. I told her one small slice of pizza now and then would probably be OK. But she got testy and told me that she’d cut the whole pizza in half and her half would be her one slice. Then she told me that I’d be better off writing my next column about pizza instead of aging.

She's probably right. What do I know about aging? But I did watch most of a YouTube video on making a pizza oven, so I’m almost an expert on that, right?