Bionic People

I live in a wondrous age... as do all of you. I was thinking about this the other day as my cohorts and I sat around after playing golf and chatted about life in general. We do this a lot.

A "new guy" to the group talked about how he decided to live in Sebring ("Paradise", as I call it)... He said it was partly because people seemed to live so long here. He is right, we have a number of guys in our group of hackers that are in their 80's and there are plenty of nonagenarians in and around this town though few of them seem to be playing golf (at least, I haven't met any here though I knew of a couple in San Diego). His other reasons were mostly economics (as were mine).

From there, talk turned to defibrillators and pacemaker implants and stents. The number of stents one has seems to be a "bragging point." Joe (age 76) has 8, most have some but not near that many (one, two, and four, as I recall). For my part, I remarked that people in our area seemed to be in a sort of competition to see who would outlast who.

I was immediately reminded of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams...

On July 4, 1826, at the age of 90, Adams lay on his deathbed while the country celebrated Independence Day. His last words were `Thomas Jefferson still survives.' He was mistaken: Jefferson had died five hours earlier at Monticello at the age of 82.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-jefferson-and-john-adams-die

But let me get back to why I think of this as a "wondrous age." It has to do with those implants, especially the pacemaker and the defibrillator. At one time, the defibrillator was a large, expensive machine found only in hospitals. Then a portable version was created, allowing them to be carried in ambulances. And now they are very small devices that can be implanted in one's torso.

My father had a pacemaker installed a few years before he passed away. He did this on advice from his cardiologist. It reduced his angina considerably but he came to see it as a mistake, extending his life when he would have rather died before becoming dependent on others. But that was him and my friends have different outlooks. Different situations and circumstances merit different decisions.

An anecdote about Ed, the guy with the defib implant:
His cardiologist told him: "If you were in your 60's, I would recommend this implant strongly. But you are 83 and you have lived a good long life so I leave it up to you."

I am glad Ed chose to do it. I would miss him terribly.