My Cyborg Self: some thoughts on being dependent
Plus an update from Chez Davis-Rose.
A couple of months ago, my husband Joel was laid off from his job and then two days later, diagnosed with kidney cancer. Here on The Spiral Lab, I wrote a plea for support and was so moved by the response. In a time of extreme financial and health precarity for my family, paid subscriptions to this newsletter almost doubled, many of you sent one-time donations, there has been a steady stream of new memberships to DDS, and most helpfully, many of you have signed up for or expressed interest in courses I am teaching. I’m so incredibly grateful.
Two weeks ago, Joel had surgery and had part of his kidney removed. He was supposed to spend one night in the hospital but because of various complications (extreme pain, infection, his kidney leaking), he ended up spending a week. We also learned, just two days before his surgery, that he also has likely cancerous lesions on his prostate, and as soon as he is all healed up from the kidney surgery, he has to go back in for a prostate biopsy and whatever follow-up is necessary.
We are incredibly fortunate that a family member is helping us pay for COBRA so we don’t lose our health insurance, but now the high-deductible sticker shock is setting in: $1000 per MRI, one of my heart meds is $600/month, we haven’t even gotten our portion of the hospital bill (and this is with insurance).
We are exhausted, but even so, we feel incredibly blessed. Our mantra these days is “Right now, today, we have everything we need.” We are trying very much to live from a place of abundance and generosity, and mostly succeeding. We have incredible families, friends, and communities.
But we could definitely still use your support! I feel self-conscious about how often I am sharing about the courses I am teaching, but honestly, this is my livelihood right now. Also, I am so freaking excited about these courses! Like truly exhilarated. It’s not just the money that is carrying me through, but the high of creating and sharing something meaningful and helpful to others. Teaching and writing have always been my true loves, and the fact that I am on the verge of making a modest living doing both of those things is a dream come true.
Speaking of which, discounted early bird tickets for the March intake of Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice are now available until noon GMT/8:00 am EST, Tuesday, 18 February. After that, prices go up—if there are any tickets left! Last session we sold out during the Early Bird window and sales are already underway. Full information about the course, including session descriptions and early bird tickets are at the link above. Note that we also offer payment plans.
Below the paywall is an essay I wrote a while ago, and recently updated, about my pacemaker surgery and what it has taught me about the nature of dependence, especially the often shameful experience of economic dependence. I don’t put much behind a paywall here at The Spiral Lab, but I do want to share a few extra perks with paid subscribers, and it makes sense for me to put work behind a paywall that I hope will one day be part of a longer published project. This is one of those pieces. I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber so that you can be part of my inner circle of first readers!
I could hardly wait to get my pacemaker/defibrillator implant.
After my heart failure diagnosis in October 2022, the fear of dying from sudden cardiac arrest became a cloud following me everywhere. That fear gripped me as I fell asleep, and my first thought when I woke was, “Oh, look! I’m still alive!” I was afraid to be alone because if my heart stopped beating, my only (vanishingly small) chance of survival was someone beginning CPR immediately. I felt like a walking time bomb that could go off any moment, without warning, and with almost certainly fatal results.
Statistically speaking, my fears were likely quite overblown—heart failure only increases my risk of sudden cardiac arrest a small amount—but my anxiety often refuses to yield to the calm, quiet voice of “reality.” The only reality I could latch onto was that a pacemaker/defibrillator device would dramatically improve my chances of surviving sudden cardiac arrest (this part is true: my chances of survival have gone from 5% to 95%).
So when an MRI indicated that the four medications I had been taking twice daily for almost six months were not doing as much as we had hoped to improve my heart function, and my cardiac team offered me the option of getting this device, it seemed like a no-brainer. That it might also improve my heart function over the long term seemed like a nice bonus, but I was really hyper-focused on the fact that it could potentially save my life right now, at the exact moment I needed it.
My doctors assured me that the procedure itself was fairly minor and had an extremely high success rate. I would not go under general anesthesia and would go home the same day. Everything they told me and everything I read suggested I would not experience much pain, and would be back to normal functioning within days, with only a few minor restrictions during the healing process. Unless I palpated the spot where the device was implanted I wouldn’t even notice it was there. I didn’t ask many questions (a mistake that is a whole other essay in itself), and I assumed that once this device was in place, I wouldn’t give it much more thought.
As it turns out, it was more complicated than all that.
Some weird transformation happened in the course of having my device implanted: I entered the hospital a human being and left a cyborg,1 forever dependent on a mechanical device nestled into a subcutaneous pocket just under my left clavicle, with three leads snaked through a blood vessel and screwed into the interior wall of my heart.