Having sat back and admired my medical analogy, a quick Google search reveals that it's not uncommon for car crash victims to be afflicted with heart attacks brought on by the trauma.
So it probably doesn't hurt to mention that cholesterol problem even as they rush you in for emergency surgery.
The Reserve Bank, which monitors the nation's financial health, certainly hasn't stopped paying attention to the nation's debt profile.
But it is fair to say that it sees the bigger priority is keeping its patient alive - with cash.
If that means more debt, then so be it.
For the record, New Zealand's great big ugly number gross debt figure was $603.5 billion this year - an annual rise of 5.4 per cent.
That figure is an aggregate of all our private debt (housing, consumer, business and agricultural) collated by the Reserve Bank, plus Crown debt and local government debt.
It equates to about $120,000 for every man, woman and child.
That's possibly a scary number to some - although I'd concede that it probably just makes the average Auckland homeowner sigh longingly.
What is scarier than the total - which is a simple gross figure - is the rate at which it has grown in just the past four years.
When the Business Herald first tallied these numbers in 2016 the total was just shy of $500b - or half a trillion.
So we've added more than $100b in four years.
Most of that has been new mortgage debt, borrowed from Australian banks to cover the cost of our rapidly inflating house prices.
The mortgage debt numbers to July 31, capture five months of the post-Covid.
They show an annual rise of 6.4 per cent - still very much in line with the growth rate across the past two years.
The pandemic has barely dented the housing market.
There was a brief dip in April while we locked down so hard that sales activity stalled.
But mortgage borrowing was back in growth mode by May.
On balance it's a good thing that the housing market has held up.
The wealth effect homeowners feel might well be a collective illusion - but right now it is a useful one, maintaining consumer confidence at a time when the economy could have been collapsing.
To see where the more immediate problems for the economy lie we need to look at the figures for business borrowing.
Business borrowing has been relatively low in New Zealand for many years.
That can be kind reassuring during times of financial crisis.
But it reflects a lack of confidence or an appetite to take risks and invest in future growth.
It has been argued that lack of investment is key feature of New Zealand's persistently low productivity growth.
So it's worrying to see business borrowing hit so hard by the pandemic.
Total business debt fell by more than 4 per cent between April and the end of July.
Extreme uncertainty about lockdowns and border closures has hit business confidence hard.
The longer this persists the more of a worry it becomes for economic growth.
We are going to need business to lead that if we hope to deal with our other rising debt issue - Crown borrowing.
The latest Treasury figures are to May 31. That captures just a fraction of the $40b in new debt the Government will issue this fiscal year.
There is broad political consensus about the need for the Government to borrow more and spend more to get us through this crisis.
There's also reasonable consensus about our capacity to safely do this.
Net Crown debt tracked down to just 20 per cent of GDP pre-Covid - low by international standards.
It may effectively double to 40 per cent of GDP and it would still look good on a table measured against our international peers.
But we will still need to pay the piper eventually.
This country is prone to natural disaster and other external shocks.
And that high level of mortgage debt weighs heavily on the country's financial stability.
We need a buffer.
Getting Crown debt back down could mean spending cuts or it could mean tax hikes.
Neither Labour nor National want to talk about either of those options right now.
The option they both prefer to talk about is definitely the best way to reduce a debt ratio.
That is to run a strong, productive economy where GDP grows rapidly, reducing the relative size of the debt.
That's sort of how we reduced Crown debt ratio over the past decade.
I say sort of because that GDP growth had more to do with immigration and a population boom than it did with productivity.
There are high hopes we can engineer more productive growth his time.
With borders closed we'll need to too.
But ironically, it is hard to see that happening until business has the confidence to borrow more.
