The worst time to get a heart attack is during a game of charades – US comedian Dmitri Martin 

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”? – Comedian George Carlin 

There used to be a billionaire banker who thought he would prolong his life by literally moving into a private hospital. He figured he’d be safer if he were surrounded by doctors and nurses , all alertly waiting to spring into action if he so  much as winced, coughed, or sneezed.   

Did he live longer? 

I suppose so, if you can call safely easing one’s way into dementia an extension of life. 

The supreme irony of life is that no one gets out alive.  And compos-mentis 

nonagenarians like Dr Mahathir – a pimply youth at the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address – are what the author Malcolm Gladwell  calls “outliers” –  those statistical rarities that time, genetics and fate, throw up occasionally.  

Well before our 80s, most of us will stop sinning, altogether. We will become, as writer Aldous Huxley observed, “the only completely consistent people.” 

It is ironic that death and taxes remain life’s only certainties. But we’ve come a long way: infant mortality used to be as high as 25% back in the 19^th Century but in the last century or so, average life expectancies have exceeded 72 years. 

That’s amazing given the ruthless opposition out there.  There are diseases, syndromes, afflictions, conditions, illnesses, infections,  ailments and maladies, all heading for us but for the Grace of God and better diets.  

There are viruses, bacteria, worms, pathogens, and assorted unspeakable horrors lurking out there, intent on infecting us but for the Grace of God,  and Alexander Fleming.

If that were not enough there are treasonable genes within our bodies, waiting for some trigger to begin running amok, mutating into auto-immune diseases, sarcomas, lymphomas, dyscrasias, blastomas and other terrifying unpronounceables designed to wreck a  human body. 

There is more.  There are things that we think are horrific: there are psychoses, mental illnesses, schizophrenia, anxieties, phobias, insanity, obsessions, exaggerated fears, and something called a neurosis which is, apparently, a secret you didn’t know you were keeping. 

That was probably the  realisation the billionaire-banker came to just before he checked himself into the hospital. 

When you finally fall sick, there is the question of choosing  your doctor.  Here you have to admire the sheer cynicism of the old Hindu proverb: “No physician is really good before he has killed at least one or two patients.”

Broadly speaking, however, there are only three rules to follow in choosing a physician:

• Never choose a doctor whose office plants are dead;

• Never use a plastic surgeon whose office is full of Picasso prints; and

• Never, ever  make the doctor your heir.

As a general rule, there is also this old saying: beware the young doctor and the old barber.

Indeed, there are those who claim medicine is often overrated. You get a cold, you go to a doctor and feel better after a week, or you ignore the cold, continue with the beer, and you feel fine after seven days. 

That’s life, isn’t it? 

ENDS