WMC Announces '6 Steps to Outliving Your Kids' Program

WEIRTON - Officials at the Weirton Medical Center raised eyebrows Thursday when they announced a week-long seminar on living longer than your children. The program, spearheaded by neurologist Joseph Wapenski, is open to the public and begins on October 6.

"This has been a dream of mine for years," said Wapenski. "Longevity is pretty much the whole point of medicine"

Wapenski and other doctors involved with the program told us that the seminar will teach adults how to live healthy, adding years to their lives as well as taking years from their offspring.

"Healthier parents are a direct correlation to depressed, lonely children," said Wapenski. "Having health freaks for parents means kids miss out on the finer points of childhood: candy, underage drinking, teenage pregnancy, going to Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit concerts, that sort of debauchery. The longer you live, the longer your kids have to deal your crap."

Cardiologist Stanley Mannino said that healthy parents are seldom seen in the Ohio Valley.

"I'd call it an epidemic," he said. "100 percent of parents in the Ohio Valley are smokers and every last one of them is morbidly obese. Of that 100 percent, 100 percent of them are addicted to amphetamines."

At the last Board of Health meeting, Brooke County Health Officer Joseph DePetro praised the idea of promoting better health, but questioned the ethics of actually trying to live longer than one's children.

"Some of the things I see in this program are quite disturbing," DePetro said. "Things like keeping a lit cigarette behind behind a box fan in your kids' bedrooms and putting asbestos in their shampoo. What's the rationale here?"

Wapenski said that another of the program's goals is to enable long-term helicopter parenting.

"Ideally, you'd be alive for the entire duration of your children's lives," he said. "That way you can always monitor them, never let them out of your sight and never let them grow up. The world is safer than it has ever been, and we want to make sure it stays that way."