Opinion: When the mind gives out before the machine

Margaret Munro is a Vancouver-based journalist. My father was preparing breakfast when his blood pressure dropped and he blacked out. Keeling over backward, he hit his head so hard it punched a hole in the wall. "Good thing I didn't hit the stud," he said in the emergency room at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. He was stable, but the wobbly lines running across a monitor wired to his chest showed the critical state of his 92-year-old heart. It had been repaired before, but now doctors offered something more – a pacemaker to keep it beating steadily. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have the ingenious devices, and many of them, like my father, likely had them implanted without considering all the implications. A cardiologist stayed late, after his scheduled surgeries, to wire Dad's heart with a German-designed Biotronik pacemaker that would restore a healthy heart rhythm. The procedure, done under local anesthetic, took less than 30 minutes.