Respect Authority

There’s hope for me yet.

Fourteen-year-old D’Zhana Simmons was released from a Miami hospital Wednesday, after living for 118 days …without a heart.

Last spring, Simmons learned she had an enlarged heart too weak to pump blood properly. After being admitted to the hospital and undergoing her first heart transplant, she found out it hadn’t worked, ostensibly when her heart stopped beating? In any case, needing to do something to keep her alive while they found a new heart, doctors replaced the transplant with a pair of artificial pumping devices that kept blood flowing until a new heart was found.

For more than 100 days, the girl had no heart in her body, just machines, proving that my fears of being heartless are completely unfounded – because I will totally survive anyway. Granted, were my experience anything like Simmons’, I would be unable to breathe on my own most of the time, and might also suffer from kidney and liver failure, but those are small prices to pay for the ability to be cold and uncaring 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Couple this with a story earlier this week about the proliferation of artificial ankles, and I’m pretty sure it’s only a matter of time before I can get that fully robotic body I’ve been dreaming about. It would undoubtedly be expensive—the average cost of a heart transplant is something like $150,000—but with a robot body, things like food, beer and my gym membership would become irrelevant, so I’m pretty sure I could afford it.