I have another story but this goes back 50 years. My mother's best friend from college had a father who worked in a factory. One day he twists his back in a machine accident and gets sent home. He can't work. The union puts him on disability.

Every day he gets up, lumbers downstairs and lies down on the couch, reading the newspaper and western novels. His wife needs the money so she gets a job first as a secretary and then selling insurance and eventually runs their small town insurance office once the owner dies. All of this is in the 1950s-70s. The husband sits out on the back porch in the summer and listens to the ball game and never gets up.

The Mom drives him to doctors appointments for decades and the result always is- no change.

Everyone's in their late 60s. I think the mother gets cancer. My mother's friend flies home and starts dealing with all these issues. Mother is dying and so she sits down and talks to all her doctors about what they can do. Then she drives her father to his appointment. Father freaks out and won't let the daughter meet with the doctor.

Very upset and looking at having to move home, the daughter comes in later to talk to the doctor about her father's condition.

Father had no back condition at all, was perfectly healthy and perfectly relaxed. Doctor had no knowledge that the father was on disability.

Both parents dead within 5 years, Mother from cancer and Father from heart attack.