Testing testing testing

Subject: Testing testing testing

There was a time, before predictive testing, when dying was a process we knew little about until it just arrived out of the blue.  People lived to be a certain age and then, with few exceptions they fell off their perch, more or less on time. People died of predictable diseases,  understandable mortal generalities written on the death certificate. They were not a precise traceable event, rather the slow break down of an ageing body, or at least that was what we thought.
Age was the crucial thing, 70 years in men 75 years in woman and with few exceptions, these actuarial signposts were pretty accurate. 

Now a days we know so much more because we have become watchful. We watch our diet, and we watch our exercise. We go for tests and we become, 'category conscious', we ask the question how well am I and ultimately, how long do I have to live. We try to cheat the Grim Reaper out of his scheduled by availing ourselves of the latest medicine has to offer. And medicine in its blind scientific surety will continue to find new and more expensive ways of keeping us what is called, alive

And so dying becomes complicated, drawn out and more stressful than it need be. The diabetic, the weak heart, the person with lung disease and the feared Big C are all flagged up in advance of actually killing you and a set of procedures put in place to keep you alive no matter how intrusive or emasculating these procedures are. The quality of life is supplanted by "life" itself, eking out an existence of days and months largely because you let the medics in, unknowingly, through an innocent blood test or a sample of flesh to examine under the microscope. Through the microscope the process of dying is revealed in all its gruesome efficiency. It's been a part of our living and has been going on since birth as cells began to replicate themselves with a lessening efficiency, slowly introducing misalignments, malcontents to challenge and replace the good with a variant of bad.
Throughout our lifetime we churn out trillions of cells, all to a chromosomic template in a replacement process which even the Chinese could not replicated. This replication process has its limits and starts to produce, on the conveyor belt, goods the "fat controller" shouldn't pass but because the consumer (our body) has become lazy and starts to accept everything  with an "it'll do" attitude, prevalent in a routine that has gone on too long. The floor around the production line becomes knee deep in rejected components and it's at this stage we do the 'test' and find all kinds of mayhem.
Perhaps without the test we would be wonderfully ignorant of the chaos in the cell factory or of the Sword of Damocles waiting to fall.
Life has at least two components. The beat beat beat of the heart and all the wonderful contingent processes which accompany it, and that other quality which the mind lends itself to fabricate and on which we base our claim to be living. Tamper with either and life actually ceases, life in the sense of a quality we apprehend as actually being alive. Without the test and our inquisitive need to know maybe we would pass into a state where death is a reward.