This is new to me, I was a really healthy person," she said, sitting in the tiny exam room. Her comment stopped me, mid busy day. She was an older woman, in her 80s, but seemed fit and healthy. A year ago, physicians had "picked up on all these things" - her hypertension, her cholesterol, her atrial fibrillation - and started treating them all. The thing was, nothing had actually happened to her over the past year, nothing had changed. She hadn't had a heart attack or a stroke. Her exercise capacity was about the same. But now she had to take a handful of pills each day; she had to go to the lab once every few weeks to monitor her antico-agulation. She'd joined the ranks of the chronically ill, even though she wasn't actually sick. Or maybe she was. Or maybe she would have been.
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