Early adopter cyborgs live among us today. They are humans, living primarily inside hospitals, needing to be monitored and connected to some machine(s) to keep alive. Plug them away from the devices, and take them out of hospitals, and they will die. I am one of them, and I am a special kind. I am a blood cyborg at the University Hospital Basel, a sanctum where Steve Jobs sought treatment for his cancer. This post covers the insane capabilities we possess for the sustenance and upgrade of blood cyborgs. You will get a sneak peek into the future potential for blood cyborgs. You might want to end up becoming one. There are other classes of cyborg; it’s just I was fortunately admitted to being the coolest type.
A blood cyborg is born when the standard machinery for producing blood in their body malfunctions in some significant way. Imagine blood like a river coursing through our bodies. It contains ships (cells), signals, and building materials. Ships perform various kinds of work in different parts of the body. We’ll focus on 3 types of ships — repair ships (thrombocytes), transport ships (erythrocytes) and warships (leukocytes). By sensing and keeping the numbers of these ships and building materials under control, the hospital keeps blood cyborgs alive. This is 95% of their job in treating my cancer. The chemotherapy itself constitutes a much smaller active part.
When a blood cyborg is admitted, the first thing the hospital does is open a cyborg port. The cyborg port is the connection between the machines and the blood. They opened the port in a large vein on my bicep, put in a tube from my bicep to near the heart, and sealed off the port to the outside world to prevent infection. External lines so the machines can access the port were attached to the port. The port comprises multiple terminals, where entry and exit of material can be done in parallel. Just like a large airport has many terminals, my cyborg port has numerous terminals. The machines can draw blood and send in a wide variety of substances in parallel through the cyborg port.
The doctors and machines are constantly at work managing my blood. Consider the aspect of repair first. In my disease, the number of repair ships in blood has sunk to minuscule levels. This is due to cancer itself eating up repair ship production capacity and chemotherapy shutting down the construction of repair ships. Hence, I am vulnerable to injury — cuts and internal injuries are significant threats. Beyond accidental cuts, doctors themselves need to periodically open up minor cuts to either take samples deep from within or deliver chemo cocktails to unique places. I can’t handle cuts, but the doctors need to make cuts. Catch 22.
They have come up with an ingenious solution. A couple of hours before they make a cut, the machines deploy (infuse) extra repair ships and extra repair concrete into my blood. The surgery is done and bandaged up. With this boost, I’ve usually closed surgical wounds in 1 day. A few days back, I started bleeding from my gastrointestinal system — blood in the stool. The doctors acted immediately — extra repair concrete was deployed. Today is the first day I haven’t bled the same way. Notice the pattern? They modulate my blood according to the life circumstances I am going through.
Everyone has oxygen transporter ships that get loaded with cargo in the lungs and then dispose of that cargo in the organs and muscles. Before diagnosis, cancer had cut the number of these ships to a third of my usual number. That, in turn, led my heart rate to double on average. I fainted on the street once and had headaches. These external signs led me to my doctors and diagnosis. So, you can imagine that the doctors keep a close watch on these transport ships. They keep me operating at half the number of ships an average person — no more. Transport ships are measured every day, and if low, I get reinforcement ships in the blood that day. These ships are red (blood-colored) and, I must admit, there is no purer nourishment I have known in life. I feel uplifted, funny, focused without any side effects like stupor.
A final aspect of my blood is that my warships are near zero. A special kind of battleship caused my cancer when it went berserk and duplicated itself beyond control. In its quest to destroy those murderous battleships, chemotherapy has basically killed off all the warships — even the good ones. As a result, I am deadly vulnerable to infections — bacteria, viruses, and fungi. If any of those critters take hold anywhere in the body, it could be game over quickly. So, the machines put various drugs — anti-bacterial, antifungal, and antiviral into my system regularly. My guess is, if a severe infection were to ever happen, the doctors would roll out a substitute navy, with warships of different designs, into my blood in an instant. They are prepared for every eventuality.
While I am keeping good spirits and eating hearty meals, some chemotherapy patients stop eating altogether. For such cases, the doctors and machines can airdrop everything — energy, vitamins, general building materials — directly into the blood! In the form of a hospital, humanity has built a blood monitoring, stabilizing, and augmenting device. It’s a wonder one can only perceive when one becomes a blood cyborg.
A blood cyborg realizes that half the things the body does are to just stabilize the blood. Stomach and gastrointestinal system? Exist to pump energy and building materials into the blood. Pancreas? Existing to control the amount of energy flowing in the blood. Kidneys? Exist to purify the blood. Breathing and lungs? Exist to have enough oxygen cargo on transporter ships. What you, as a person — the senses, the brain, the muscles, the sexual system really needs — is good blood.
That ushers in the imagination of late adopter blood cyborgs. The hospital will be shrunk into a blood monitoring and modulating device worn inside the body. Or they will have such a unit at home to which they plug themselves every night. Whatever the system, these blood cyborgs will have optimized blood. They won’t suffer obesity since excess energy is never pumped into their blood. They won’t suffer from diabetes because of similar reasons. Their wounds will heal in an hour or two since they are fortified with repair ships exactly when needed. Their warships will be augmented when they travel to a foreign country. They will climb Everest quickly by boosting the number of transport ships. And maybe, just maybe, they won’t age since the signals for aging are carried, alas, in the blood. Here beckons blood cyborg humanity!
