I drove my father to his cardiologist appointment once, and my mom wanted me to ask a question:
Q/ My mom is worried because my dad goes out with a lawn chair to rake leaves. He rakes until he is red and puffing and can't stand up. He sits down for a while, then as soon as he can he gets right back up and dives back in. Mom's question is should he be doing this.
Doc's A/ If all my patients acted like your father, none of them would need me. Tell your mom not to worry.
Some years before that, in his late 50s, he'd had a quintuple bypass. I don't even know what that is. After the operation, the doctor told us that by rights my father should have been long dead. He didn't have any vessels to be pushing blood through, and the doctor figured that maybe his heart was so strong that he was just pushing blood through places it shouldn't really go. When he finally died, at 96, it wasn't his heart that did it.
This is the same man who I reported in another thread today after a couple of hip operations switched in his 80s from his Schwinn LeTour to my mom's heavy old one speed pink and white girl's bike for his 20 miles a day because he couldn't lift his leg. I told my mom that someday he would go under the wheels of a garbage truck and that's how he wanted to go. My mom was horrified but my dad just laughed and said "She doesn't get it at all." He'd also been a four-letter man in college, in his school's Sports Hall of Fame, and a Golden Gloves boxer. Though I'm not a jock at all, I learned a lot from him about refusing to stop.