“l am sure they can’t stop you from letting us know if she is even still alive????” wrote one friend on her Facebook pag

A series of fundraising events were organized, including a bottle drive and “an evening of fun and laughter” comedy show at a nightclub close to the indoor roller rink that was central to my early adolescence. The “Help Save Cindy’s Life” page on Facebook had a “shop now” option, where well-wishers could purchase donated goods, like handmade beaded necklaces or a half-hour reflexology session.,Despite all that support, it appeared as if Cindy was losing her battle with CIDP. Cindy’s home nurses — three men named Tom, Chris, and Jeff who never appeared in photos or seemed to have their own social media profiles — took over her Facebook account to update Cindy’s friends on her condition, alternating desperate pleas for help with small, endearing details of Cindy’s new normal.,Cindy and her hundreds of supporters took advantage of a number of online tools to raise money. A garage sale was organized through snapd, a platform for community events. In periodic YouTube videos, Cindy displayed the generous gifts friends donated and the medical equipment she was able to buy. In addition to GoFundMe and Facebook, the support group — which included friends, acquaintances, some of Cindy’s family members, and other more distant connections sucked into her orbit — turned to 32auctions.com to sell donated items, including a “Niagara Falls Getaway,” a “Pampered pooch deluxe kit” (including a dog bed and organic treats), and costume jewelry. Almost all of the items sold, and, in a reunion of sorts, I watched as old classmates I’d long ago forgotten emerge to claim them.,For as long as I’ve had one, I’ve been acutely aware that a pacemaker is a sensitive machine and can be derailed by plenty of things: airport security; laser tag vests; the seats in 4D amusement park rides; store security towers; cellphones; and still, somehow, microwaves. All of these things could disrupt the pacemaker, reprogram it, even stop it cold. As a child in the grocery store, I ran through the theft towers quickly, like I was trying to shoplift. I sat on the sidelines while friends ripped through laser tag arenas at birthday parties. Fewer than two years into post-9/11 hysteria, I panicked as a nine-year-old when a TSA agent came toward me with a security wand. I bolted, running farther into the terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport. I only made it a few yards before I was stopped by a knee to my chest, a muscled agent pulling me to the ground. My panic had made me into an apparent security threat.,Hughes’s anonymous poet couldn’t outrun the avalanche. He sought to abandon Blackness, aiming to be absorbed safely into the rolling white mass. As Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” provides, discussing race in its fullness challenges the United States’s habitual deconstruction of the Black identity. With great clarity and recognition, the essay reveals a feeling deeply profound about this country’s history: the Black experience and her people are as American as apple pie, not a strange phenomenon outside of this country’s culture.,Raising such an enormous sum seemed like an incredibly steep hill to climb, but Cindy’s supporters were determined, and organized. A woman named Hilary, Cindy’s best friend of many years, led the fundraising charge, drawing on her intimate knowledge of Cindy to inspire others. “Cindy is truly one of a kind, with a heart that is bigger than this world!,” Hilary wrote on the GoFundMe campaign. “She will do whatever she can, with the resources she has to help others. She is always paying it forward, to family, friends and her community. She is passionate about human rights and equality, never afraid to stand up for what’s right. With her incredible sense of humor, determination and love for everyone, Cindy has gained the love ad [sic] respect of many and always leaves a lasting impression wherever she goes!”,It was in mid-March that Cindy’s caregiver took to Facebook to announce that one of Cindy’s friends, in a spectacularly loving and shocking gesture, sold his home to help keep Cindy alive. The price of the house was never disclosed, but it was, according to Cindy’s nurse Chris, reduced to sell “against the advice of his real estate agent.” If this kind of generosity didn’t motivate others to give until it hurt, what would?,ICDs are just one increasingly popular medical gadget in a rising sea of clinical and commercial wireless health devices. Whether it is the growing suite of cardiac-monitoring devices available at home and on the go or an Apple Watch outfitted with diagnostic software, we are outsourcing more and more of our health to internet-enabled machines.,Cindy couldn’t seem to catch a break, and the terrible toll of her illness mounted: According to one update, she was hospitalized against her will when she had a bad reaction to new medicine, and then had to be airlifted to another hospital; she was chronically short of lifesaving medication and repeatedly just weeks from death. A local law firm run by the father of my close childhood friend drew up Cindy’s will pro bono and donated CA$800.,Having now lived with an ICD for more than three years and a pacemaker for the preceding 14, I understand intimately the consequences of being a body paired to the grid. If your smart fridge loses connectivity, maybe your food goes bad a few days early. But if a wireless ICD experiences a failure, the result could be lethal. I am stalked by the fear of the device misfiring and have wondered endlessly whether the documented security risks posed by these devices could end up harming me.,The first cardiac device I had was a pacemaker, implanted when I was nine years old. Though pacemakers and ICDs have overlapping patient demographics and are sometimes bundled in the same device, they have drastically different functions. Pacemakers help a patient’s normal heart rhythm cycle, while ICDs are tiny defibrillators meant to terminate dangerous arrhythmias and prevent cardiac arrest. In everyday life, defibrillators wait in hospitals and public spaces (gyms, churches, movie theaters) for disaster to strike — they are tools you seek out in an emergency. But an ICD brings the emergency response to you. It is watchful, an active listener. I think of a pacemaker as a heartbeat assistant; an ICD is an arrhythmia assassin.,Still, Cindy was clearly fighting as hard as she could. Her battle against CIDP appeared simultaneously valiant and miserable. A fundraising video from December 2014 — where Cindy was depicted as locked in a desperate race against time — was underscored by the Mariah Carey song, “Hero.” Nurse Chris posted on Facebook about Cindy’s dramatic rally against her illness on December 21, 2014: “Cindy woke up crying and grabbing at her breathing tube. The doctors removed it and she is breathing on her own!! With her left hand, she felt her body and felt all the wires and tubes. I was holding her hand, telling her I was here with her… She is a miracle!”,Back in December of 2014, about a month after the GoFundMe was launched, Nurse Tom had posted a warning on Facebook — one of many such warnings that would continue into the spring. Cindy was rapidly deteriorating and desperately needed money to keep her alive. “We don’t know if she will ever be well enough to get her stem cell transplant but let’s give her the best life we can, while she’s still with us,” he wrote. “Please, dig deep into your hearts, instead of that morning coffee, would you consider donating that dollar in Cindy’s name? I am begging you all. I see her everyday and what she goes through. The pain, the IV’s, the 32 oral medications, the aches, the chronic fever, the internal infections, the tiredness and I hear her silent cries behind closed doors. Help me save her. Please. I am asking, begging with all I have left in me.”,Maybe she was a miracle. Not long after Cindy went blind, one of her nurses — all of whom clearly adored Cindy and mirrored her wacky, self-deprecating tone in their Facebook posts — commented on the arrival of some cash that had been mailed by concerned friends. Cindy was severely weakened, the post noted, but she had taken that money out of the envelope, used the Braille on the bills to count it, and was immediately overcome by the generosity.,In April of 2015, Cindy’s fundraising garage sale was suddenly canceled, sparking general confusion. Her supporters were outraged, almost crazed, about what the failure to raise funds might mean for a woman who was chronically on the verge of losing access to lifesaving medications. But social media details of Cindy’s well-being were suddenly scarce.