For the past seven years I have enjoyed the dependable companionship of a pacemaker. I’m not talking about a life coach or a personal trainer; I’m talking about a pacemaker that is actually wired into the chambers of my heart and makes it beat.
Actually, it’s more than just a pacemaker, it is also an implanted cardioverter-defibrillator, prepared to shock my heart into a normal rhythm should it develop a life-threatening arrhythmia. I think of it as carrying around a personal paramedic in my chest.
It’s quite odd to be bionic. I have to avoid strong magnetic fields like those used at airports, and for some reason I don’t understand entirely, it’s recommended that I keep my distance from chain saws. The latter has posed no particular burden, as chain saws join shotguns on my list of items bearing no significant attraction to me whatsoever.
From time to time I’m asked about whether I worry about my dependence on technology. Given the way computers crash, toasters short and bulbs burn out, I suppose this question is not all that farfetched. Most technology today is built with obsolescence in mind, and in our throw-away society we’ve become accustomed to replacing our mechanical devices frequently. In the case of pacemaker-defibrillators however, the manufacturing effort seems to have been decidedly more conservative, and the rate of failure or defect is quite small. The batteries last a very long time, and when they do get low after seven years or so, the unit emits a boring little tune at 9 a.m. to remind me to call the doctor. How disappointing to discover that the choice of tune cannot be my own; I think I would have chosen something fun, like the last refrain of Dylan’s “It’s All Right Ma.”
It’s true that something could go very wrong with my pacemaker, but then again something could go very wrong with any number of my major organs, blood vessels or my mind. For all I know, something is going very wrong with them right now. The fact is that our bodies are complex and life is so uncertain that from moment to moment not one of us knows exactly what’s to come. We assume that each second will be followed by another, because that’s the way it’s happened up till now. The truth is we don’t know for sure the precise moment of our demise, let alone what we will eat for dinner tomorrow. Philosophers have speculated for millennia about this fact and tried to understand how we carry on each day despite being filled to the brim with uncertainty. I personally think that we owe it to our profoundly forgetful nature, and our remarkable facility to become distracted by the likes of a heaping plate of nachos and cold beer.
I recently had my pacemaker replaced by a newer one. The surgeon slipped it into the little pocket in my chest where the last one sat so comfortably. In seven years, of course, technology has greatly improved, and this new unit does all kinds of fancy stuff. Alas, it can’t open Microsoft Word and still won’t play the type of music that I want, but then again, unless my mind shorts out, I can always hum Bob Dylan.
