Electronically empowered heart - some news

Thanks
If I’m safe now, able to write down my thoughts and almost ready to go back to my wonderful job - it’s first thing thanks to Amandine whose presence has been of great and essential help during those tough times, when I had to take some decisive decisions concerning my health and my life to come, those decisions which were hard to take but that are now proving to be the right ones.

Disclaimer:
This text is made from pretty rough notes which took me time to assemble here - if at some point you feel like a complaining tone, please dismiss this feeling and try to imagine my usual smile while writing all this down: my life is wonderful yet again!
Also, my foreigner’s english (french - the worst) will certainly distract your reading and might make everything a bit funny (please enjoy freely) - nonetheless, despite the distraction please go on with the reading: since the time I left hospital with my «new heart», I feel like I should share all these thoughts on my new engineered and improved body, and show a bit off with my newly gained status of REAL cyborg, which makes the whole thing a lot more glamour and dramatic (than it actually is!).
I also apologise in advance for those of you more fluent with medical description which will (almost) certainly spot confusion, error and inadequacy in the following description/explanations - please feel free to correct/update trough the comments

How I feel now:
The scar is still a bit sensible, but I’m feeling way better than anytime before, I’m slowly recovering and getting use to the pills, the little box and the attached cables (i can feel them with the finger), the scar is almost not painful anymore - it’s has been 3 weeks since the operation - but the box makes such a weird angle that it forbids me to have a rucksack (hint hint hint… i do love the solar bags e-toy showcased a while ago), it feels a bit weird sometime to feel my heart being slowed down by something I know is there, inside, but out of my control, especially when it’s reducing a very fast beat. Even the aluminium taste in the back of my mouth sometimes is not exactly something one might qualify as comfortable - but it’s all wonderful since all this let me know I’m safe and alive now.

As I still feel quite tired, I hardly can work normally as of yet, but I feel like I will be much more effective than anytime before, once my convalescence is over - not being exhausted and breathless due to a hard crisis lasting for days will definitely make a HUGE difference in my life. I plan my coming-back for the 15th of September; I will be taking 1 month of hollydays since this can’t make stuff worst, especially when the destination is Reunion Island, Amandine’s home - apart maybe work-wise, but that is something I will take care of later. At the moment I’m rediscovering my improved body - it’s a completely brand new experience for me.
Makin and I were joking yesterday about the fact that I am a real cyborg now - not one with the fanciest decorations (piercing and body modifications) but a real one, a modified body with a functional and designed purpose - thanks to the incredible intelligence and adaptiveness of the human specie, We developed tools since we left the trees, and now We are able, with a very simple operation, to improve life and modify destiny; I have to admit it, when the doctors said I would have to get the device implemented under the skin for life, I took it easy on the surface, but once left alone I cried. That’s a kind of concept I was not really ready to integrate and accept - but the truth is: once it is done, once I jumped and made the «evolutionary» step, it’s rather a quite comfortable thought and I feel way better in any case. Now, all those troubles are over, I feel safer than ever - and believe me it’s a great thing to think about, just add on top of that the fact of being able to say I’m a real cyborg - you get the picture: I’m proud and happy of these decisions!

The device:
The little box is called an ICD - as far as I understood it, this is a combination of a defibrillator and a pacemaker. The defibrillator help my heart to beat regularly, while the pacemaker pace it - slow it down. The device does essentially 2 things:
- it monitors and record my heart’s activity using sensors, like a black box in a plane.
- it slow it down when it detects a crisis is starting, the sensors are able to deliver electricity in the core centre of the heart - the amount of electricity triggered depending on parameters.
These parameters are a couple of values that were inserted in the core programme of the machine before I left the hospital. The values corresponds to the heart rhythm I was experiencing and are designed according to the drug I’m taking; basically it starts slowing my heart down round 120 bpm: it will trigger some super small electric shock to make the heart thinks it already gave the beat and wait for the next one, slowly bringing it to a regular beat, and slowing it down to a normal rhythm. If the action of the ICD is not enough to calm it and the heart goes faster, round 180 bpm the electric discharge will be more perceptible, and i will progressively feel them as the voltage will be augmented - and it’s only at 220 bpm that the electroshocks will be triggered - first one at 10 joules, second and remaining at 36. The electroshock are not painful - the pain comes from the fact you have time to be conscious that something is painful, the pain remain and you can think of it - but if pain is as fast as a finger snap and leaves immediately, then it’s globally ok, I remember having such good laughs with the nurses in the emergency service of the London Royal Hospital just after a shock was triggered. So far i didn’t mention how pleased i have been by the doctors, the nurses and all the staff from the Harvey ward in St Bartholomew - you were all wonderful and despite the context, my stay has been greatly embellished by you.

My body and the open source idea
I think I can say that most of the troubles are over now, and since I now have much more time to think about (the Action is over) here comes the time of the reflection, the adaptation to a set of new rules/facts. Being an ever unsatisfied designer, and a proud user of open sourced technologies, my main concern is about the licence of the technology now embedded in my body; it feels super weird that the device under my skin, from St Jude Medical, an ATLAS 2 + DR Model V-268, along with the leads ISOFLEX S 1642T and RIATA ST 7000 respectively connected to my top and bottom (or is it the opposite?) right ventricle are actually made of proprietary technologies, owned by «someone» (hence the definition of an organisation, under the British law) I don’t know and I will probably never meet.

That’s confusing me a lot - at the same time I would like to thank the people who developed the device and its technology which might one day save my life at the occasion of a crisis that otherwise (the device not being embedded in my body and wired to my heart) might have been fatal; and at the same time I can’t refrain myself to imagine what would happen if for any reason the company St Jude Medical was going bankrupt - let’s imagine the other companies on the market (there are 3 main players, and 4 smaller) buy all the patents but not the one that cover the technology i have embedded inside of me. I know it has the least probable chance to happen - but still that could happen… And this simple probability unleashed in my imagination some questions that might sounds like taken straight out of a Gibson’s novel: what would happen to my body? what would happen if the doctors lost track of the procedure to remove/replace or reprogram the device? what are my warranty? I have been lucky to find a bed in the best cardiac service in London - what will happen to me in 5 years from now? (my device, because it contains a battery, have to be changed every 5 years)

As of yet, the idea of an open-source model is exciting all my neurones most of the time, one of my incoming projects being to do further research on the subject - and why not at some point: let’s imagine an open-source adventure to free my engineered body from embedded trademark and patents.