THE WISDOM OF REPUGNANCE:

Mother Cyborg (Annalee Newitz, 11/21/02, Metro Active)

I HAVE ALWAYS been in favor of cyborgs, of human bodies threaded through with technology, but my faith was shaken when my mother was dying. I got the call last month, late at night: the operation had failed; her heart wouldn't beat. The doctors weren't sure she would last another few hours, but they had managed to get the local VA hospital to ship a high-tech heart pump to the intensive cardiac-care unit. They'd hooked her arteries up to its metal-reinforced plastic tubes and valves. The machine was beating for her instead of a heart. They were keeping her alive, hoping her organs would bounce back. I arrived in Cynthia's hospital room 12 hours later, after a series of sleep-deprived, hasty arrangements and what felt like the plane ride of doom.

When I finally saw her, a tiny pale unconscious body at the center of a machine collage, I had already steeled myself for the worst. She's dying, I'd told myself over and over. I am here to deal with the death of my mother. But she was alive, and her internal organs were splattered all over the room: her body had been turned inside out, its functions rerouted to the computers that controlled her artificial heart, her digestive tract, her temperature, the levels of sodium and plasma in her blood. Her body--her real body, the one that gave hugs and head pats--was hidden in layers of blankets and obscured by tubes. But I saw gore and viscera in the wires, boxes and lights that made up her surrogate life system.

And I choked. I who have spent the last several years among machines, developing relationships with networks and peripherals and devices that alter my body and my perceptions--I who have lived among people whose bodies are physically wired up to computers all the time, or whose mobility depends upon machines--I choked. I saw my mother, the cyborg, and I couldn't stay in the room. Biting my lip, digging my nails into my arms, I stood outside her door and stared at my mother's feet, sticking out of the covers at the end of her bed. They were her natural-born feet, no technological intervention necessary for their welfare.

I knew the machines were helping her, that the long, fat tubes full of dark red snaking out from under her covers into a pump were possibly saving her life. I knew she needed the feeding tube up her nose, the breathing tube down her throat, the half-dozen IV drips and drainage tubes. I knew the drill--hell, I'd written the damn drill dozens of times--about how our bodies are just machines, and when they break down or need enhancement we should use our own admittedly crude machines to help them along. But upon seeing a true cyborg, her survival dependent on a hybrid of biology and medical technology, my first reaction was utter horror. Those machines were violating her body. They were unnatural.

Some years ago, Dick Lamm, then Governor of CO, got himself in a good bit of hot water when he said that the elderly may have "a duty to die." As we develop an ever greater capacity to extend life, or the semblance of such, through such artificial means we may have to finally wrestle with that idea. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2002 1:32 PM