[Norm K]

When my wife was a Naval Nurse at Balboa (an enlisted Marine married to a Squid officer - yup, we pulled it off) she worked the Med-Surg ward for quite some time. It was pretty much the place they'd send retirees for whom intensive care wasn't an option, as there really wasn't anything that was going to save them anyway. So they'd stay until they either got "well" enough to go home (or somewhere else) to die or they'd just die on the ward.

Anyway, I learned something important during my many visits there: the terms "Little Old Man" and "Little Old Lady" exist for a reason. All of the WWI vets I met were thin old guys. Plenty of much younger guys there, too: fat guys from WWII, Korea and VN who were extremely ill as a result of their obesity. There's enough things in this world to kill me - being fat won't be one of them.

_