Today, I read this Michael Kinsley piece in a recent New Yorker, the premise of which being that longevity is essentially the last competition that you'll ever have, and that after arriving at sixty years old, it's totally up for grabs whether you'll die tomorrow or live until ninety. Fun!
Oh, and, I certainly wasn't aware of the state of surgery/repair w/r/t Parkinson's:
[The symptoms] got even milder after I had an operation, a couple of years ago, to implant wires in my brain and two pacemaker-type batteries in my chest ... During the operation, your head is screwed into a metal frame and the frame is screwed into the operating table. My surgery lasted nine hours, and for most of it I had to be awake, so that the doctors could test the connection, like asking somebody to go upstairs and see if the light in the bedroom comes back on while you fiddle with the circuit-breaker box in the basement.
It's the future! And it's pretty fascinating.
I think you just won the "depressing blog post" trifecta.
1) Future = death
2) After 60, who the fuck knows what will happen
3) Brain surgery
Congrats!
Posted by: Michael Sippey | April 15, 2008 at 11:04 PM
The idea of being awake while someone fiddles with my brain really creeps me out.
Posted by: Xris Ernest Hall | April 15, 2008 at 11:50 PM