I'm going to die of something, but likely not this

Heart disease will apparently not be the cause of my death. I had an ECHO stress electrocardiogram (EKG) yesterday. My doctor recommended it because she had recently discovered a change in my routine EKG. The transmission time had increased for an electrical signal from my "right bundle block," I think she said. She thought we should try to rule out the possibility that there might be a coronary artery blockage.
    Having been reading Nortin M. Hadler, MD's book, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America, I asked a few questions designed to find out whether the test were really necessary. "Would whatever we find have any practical value?" "Would possible interventions make any sense anyway?"
    She stuck by her recommendation that I have the test.
    The otherwise nice technician didn't use enough lather (if she used any?) to shave some patches of hair off my chest before sticking the EKG leads to me and taking readings of me lying, sitting, and standing prior to her greasing my chest for the pre-treadmill sonogram. The sonogram took so long that I fell asleep during it. I was, after all, lying down—in my favorite position on my left side, and the lights were out so she could see the graphic image of my pumping heart on the monitor.
    Then the cardiologist came in and explained the treadmill procedure. She always uses the "Bruce" schedule that calls for 3-minute intervals, with the speed and incline of the device increasing for each after the first.
    I guess the cardiologist thought I was doing pretty well, because after three or four intervals she asked me what I did for exercise.
    "Well, not much really. I just walk across campus as part of my commute. I pass most of the undergraduates, even the twenty-year-old girls in tight pants whom I might prefer to slow down and follow at a good watching distance if it weren't for the exercise."
    "Oka-a-ay," she said, "maybe we'd better not go there."
    I'm not sure in which ordinal interval I called it quits, but it was after about twenty seconds into it, after I'd finally begun to jog rather than walk fast. It was at a pretty good incline, too.
    I was instructed to lie down again, quickly, no talking, for the post-treadmill sonogram. I lay down breathing fast and deeply, feeling good, maybe a little smug.
    After the cardiologist did the sonogram, she said everything looked "super," she could see nothing to be concerned about.
    I asked her how fast the treadmill was going during the last interval.
    "Six miles per hour. And you went more than two minutes longer than the last time we did this. Nothing wrong with your heart!"
    "You mean, if I'd kept that up for an hour I'd have covered six miles!" I think the chart on the wall said that at 6 MPH, the treadmill was inclined to 18 or 20 degrees.
    "That's right," she said.
    "Or died along the way," I added.
    "Yes, that's entirely possible," she said.

A principle of my old friend (and Yale roommate), Dr. Hadler, in his book mentioned above is that since we all die of something, we need to weigh the value of any medical intervention against the possibility that we might die of something else before we die of whatever the intervention is supposed to forestall. I trust that this layman's paraphrase is accurate; in no way can I convey the elegant definitiveness of Nortin's text.
    It would appear that no medical interventions on behalf of my heart will be necessary. The cause of my death will most likely be the failure of some other part or system or my body (or accident).