My father was a sickly kid. By the time he was six years old he had contracted polio, which left one leg an inch and a half shorter than the other, rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart, and another disease that almost killed him, something people don't get any more like scarlet fever or typhoid, or one of those. The doctors told his mother that his heart was so bad, he would probably not live past his teens.
He lived to be 65 years old. I attribute that to his having a tremendous will to live and, as an adjunct to that, he always took very good care of himself, getting regular medical checkups and following the advice of his doctors.
His sister Mae, three years his senior, liked to tell the story of his having been sent to the store for milk when he was about eleven or twelve years old. He was gone a long time and she was getting impatient. Finally she went outside and looked down the street to see if he was coming. She saw him in the next block sitting in the middle of the sidewalk with the bottle of milk beside him. After what seemed to her a long time, he finally got up, picked up the milk bottle, and trudged on home.
As soon as he was within earshot, she lit into him, asking him what he thought he was doing dawdling along when she was so anxious to have the milk, to which he calmly replied, "The doctor said if I get tired, I should rest. I was tired -- so I rested."
There is a lesson in that for all of us, I think.
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