Persuing health as a life goal?

I want to avoid making my life a series of measures designed to simply extend my lifespan. Now that I've danced with mortality in a particularly frantic and fearful way, there is a temptation to make survival the overriding theme of my life from now on. Perhaps pushing "healthy living" to the background is what got me into this mess in the first place, but I'm not sure I want the preservation of my body to become my number one priority from now on.

When everything I do revolves around the illness and the avoidance of more illness, the only net result I can see is that I will become a colossal bore, especially to myself. Maybe a long-lived bore, but what good is that? I hate just being about this. I want to leap-frog a couple of years in the future, where people will forget this ever happened, and we'll talk of something other than how I feel. Comparing aches & pains, talking about our latest surgeries or medical indignities...this is what getting old sounds like!

I also resent that now a good portion of my life is going to revolve around bi-monthly or semi-annual checkups with various specialists, constant tests and re-tests to ferret out any hidden problems, taking daily medications and handfuls of nutritional supplements, eating right, daily exercise, and all the rest, always monitoring in the background for something out of the ordinary, something that might signal "danger!" I did these things in the past (or so I thought) in a matter-of-fact way, and look where that got me. Now I have to do it consciously, and I'm cranking about it.

Just this week, I will have been to see a doctor or had another test five times. Next week, there will be another appointment, and again, another the week after that. I am starting to feel that from now on my real life is going to be sandwiched in between doctor visits, instead of the other way around.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. I skated through this experience with a minimum amount of medical intervention--I didn't have to go through radiation, or chemotherapy, or any of the normal post-op treatments that most patients have to endure. So why am I being such a baby about this? Maybe the trick is just to do what has to be done, and forget about it in between the times I have to present myself for observation and more testing.

I'm either going to have to develop some sort of mode where I can put these health-related activities in a mental box that doesn't slop over into the rest of my life, or find a way of integrating it, without it overshadowing everything I do or think or feel.