Heartless

I felt the quiet whirring and almost imperceptible tick-swish-hush of my CardioStar Heart Replacement system, known more commonly as a CHARM. It used to be the only thing I could hear, but the human brain can get used to just about anything, and the sound of the nanoserv motors had long since faded into the background. I was more likely to hear the rain, the wind, or the woodpecker that used to nest outside my window and treat me to minigun blasts of mating knocks.

I miss that woodpecker so much.

I’m old enough to remember when artificial hearts and ventricular assist devices were considered last ditch, Hail Mary efforts for desperately sick and very rich people. But then Martina Weiss invented the CHARM. People who would have died of heart disease in their prime were now keeping their faculties and living active lives at the century mark and beyond.

I turned on the TV that morning. The news had an interview with the last doctor to perform old-fashioned heart surgery — bypasses, porcine and bovine mitral valve replacements, aorta repairs, that kind of thing. The medical schools don’t even teach those procedures anymore because those skills became unnecessary and obsolete when the CHARM was invented. It would be like telling a drone mechanic to repair a horse carriage. I was in the very last cohort of North American doctors who learned the old way of doing things.