*** Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice. This is my own story and observations.
We’re all going to zero, but still need to look forward to that future, however long it may last. It’s fundamental to not go gently into that good night. This is my story to plan for my future and to execute on that plan before this timeline executes me.
The general fear of death is a fact of human existence. That fear stays in fuzzy abstraction because none of us know the hour. But what if you knew statistically how you would die? As smart, rich, (and desperate) technocrats are planning to live forever, outlasting death generally and cancer specifically. The big C is a gotcha that can getcha from so many different angles, in such slow and horrible ways, people seem to forget about the biggest risk of any early demise: heart attack, specifically soft plaque rupture causing and choking off of a coronary artery.
“But we shouldn’t worry because only poor, dumb, fat people die of heart disease, right?” It seems so easy to solve for the runaway largest killer: “Just don’t be fat: eat right and exercise, watch your cholesterol” is about the best information commonly offered. That advice helps, but doesn’t come close to solving the problem. Avoid going broad and equating only the metabolic syndrome (diabesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia) with risk, because if avoiding a heart attack as as easy as “don’t be overweight: exercise and eat right, “ my mom wouldn’t have had a heart attack at 48, and I wouldn’t have walked into my first cardiologist appointment with a diagnosed 50/50 shot of having a MI at some point in my life.
While it’s good to be afraid of the quickly painful, “dropping dead of a heart attack,” (cardiac arrest), it’s more realistic to be terrified of surviving a heart attack (soft plaque rupture causing myocardial infarction) only to be physically debilitated by the fractional strength of your heart, or mentally incapacitated by having oxygen cut off to the brain too long, or dragging around a crate of high dosage meds, and all the side effects that go with them. So far I’ve learned it’s smart to be afraid, and to use that fear to help solve for my own unique risk puzzle.