On wearable medical devices and nervous system responses
From the drafts folder
Recently I had a 48 hour holter monitor put on. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s basically a wearable heart monitor that continuously tracks your heart rhythms. Someone described it as literally wearing your heart on your sleeve, which feels pretty accurate to how I felt wearing it.
All these leads were stuck to my chest, and they went to this little monitor I strapped around my waist. In the world of wearable medical devices, this is a really small thing. Relatively painless (aside from the fact I react to so many things and the tape irritated my skin), for the most part able to be hidden under a shirt, mildly annoying but I could still function.
What I didn’t expect wearing this lovely little heart monitor was the reminders that it would bring up in my mind and body.
For 23 years, I had a feeding tube surgically placed in my stomach. I was hooked up to machines, force fed nutrition. For a while I had different continuous glucose monitors, or other similar devices placed in different areas on my skin. It was for these reasons I thought my heart monitor journey would be a walk in the park. But I wasn’t prepared for the mental struggle that came with it.
Just knowing it was there, constantly itching at my skin, was enough for me to be on edge the entire time I wore it. How I felt in my body was different, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was uncomfortable, sure, but not uncomfortable enough I should have been zoning out in meetings.
As I sat in front of the mirror on my last morning with the monitor, trying to figure out what it was that was bothering me so much, I realized I’d been dissociating as an attempt to protect myself. Not knowing what results this monitor might hold, it felt safer to distance myself from reality. And having the monitor brought up all these reminders of the feeding tube, of not having that bodily autonomy, of things happening to me without my consent, of not being in control over what went into my body when.
It’s all things my pediatric team of doctors didn’t think of when their sole focus was keeping me alive, and it wasn’t something that crossed my mind when I got my monitor put on. But as I began to heal post transplant, both body and mind, I began to see just how much that plastic tube had effected me, and my sense of bodily autonomy.
So while this monitor wasn’t actually taking over any of my bodily functions, just documenting them, the fact that I could see it on the outside of my body, that I was aware of it, felt like a threat to a nervous system who remembered that being associated with that loss of autonomy,
So what did I do? As soon as I noticed what was happening, and why my body was responding the way it did, I took my hands and pressed them against where the monitor was hooked to my chest, and over my g-tube scar. I told my body I saw her fear, and that even though these two devices weren’t even remotely the same the embodied feeling was similar. And I said whatever results came from this monitor, we would figure it out together. That I wasn't going to let anything happen to her without my being there.
If I didn’t know about nervous system states, I don’t think I would have made the connection between my current dissociation and my past trauma. I probably would have shamed myself for having a bad case of brain fog. But when I approached myself with grace for being human, I allowed my responses to shift, and allowed a new narrative to begin to form.
