Something is wrong with Jackie, definitely. All of that belies how ill she really is. It’s a nervous tic.”) She’s currently working on a documentary about people with implanted defibrillators, entitled Diary of a Cyborg. She’s able to exercise (Although, she adds, “I constantly check my pulse. An aspiring filmmaker, she graduated from the University of Chicago and has managed to find steady work filming and editing videos for her alma mater. She has a chronic illness, but she’s not frail. It’s a cliché to say that Jackie doesn’t seem sick-but she doesn’t, at least not at first glance. Her vision went white, her knees buckled, and she collapsed at the top of a stairwell, unconscious. “It knocked the wind out of me.” Her heart rate had skyrocketed to 275 beats per minute, and the initial shock didn’t jar it back to normal. “When it fired, it was as if someone had shoved metal doors violently into my back,” she says. She’d had an implanted device for two years. Her sisters had warned her that she needed to hurry up to make a screening of the second Harry Potter film. “It felt like daggers poking into my lungs,” she told me. It was late fall, about 45 degrees-the air chills early in Chicago. The first time Jackie’s implanted defibrillator shocked her heart back into a regular rhythm, she had been sprinting across her high-school campus. “This device will do everything it can to prevent my heart from stopping,” she says. She jokes that she’s part cyborg, but it’s not entirely a gag: a $50,000 machine is keeping her alive. In a sense, Jackie’s whole life is archived in a code that she can’t interpret. It’s constantly collecting information it’s a diary of dates, times, and events. She also has a small computer inside of her chest. Jackie Todd is 27 years old, with sly eyes, a laugh that seems to come from deep in her belly, and thick, dirty-blond hair that she dyes a fiery copper hue.
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