An X-ray of the author’s chest. All photos courtesy of the author.

‘Like Being Grilled Alive’: The Fear of Living With a Hackable Heart

A device connected to my heart could save my life. It could also be hacked.

Three nights before Christmas 2016, I was standing in my bathroom when a gallop broke out across my chest. It was ventricular tachycardia, a dangerous kind of arrhythmia where only one side of the heart pumps and does so at high speed, denying blood from moving through it. At the age of 23, I’d had arrhythmias all my life, but had never felt anything like this. Twenty minutes later, with the arrhythmia still going, I was in the back of a parked ambulance. Alone with the EMTs, I braced for the shock of a defibrillator.

The pain was overwhelming, like being grilled alive. It ran out from a center point in my chest and flowed into every organ, every limb, into my fingers and toes. Later, waiting in the trauma section of the Mount Sinai emergency room, doctors shocked me again.

Months of testing followed. I started taking drugs that would help reduce my arrhythmias, but in addition, my doctors suggested they replace my pacemaker with something called an ICD. The ICD would be a fail-safe, a tiny defibrillator inside my body that could go everywhere that I went.