cy·borg
noun | /'sīˌbôrg/
A being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts; a cybernetic organism.
That’s the textbook definition. Cold. Clean. Devoid of sensation. It doesn’t mention pain. Or recovery. Or faith.
It doesn’t tell you what it feels like to wake up with a chunk of your skeleton sawed off and replaced with a 3D-printed prosthesis—something called an Infinity Ankle. It says nothing about bone being cut, the nerves that scream for months, or the way your body, against all odds, begins to accept the foreign as part of itself.
By definition, I’m a cyborg now. A first-generation, real-life version. Not a sleek android from science fiction, but a man rebuilt out of necessity and pain. I never set out to be part machine. But here I am—walking on metal and memory, trying to make peace with both.
And yet, as I recover, as I adapt to the ache of integration, I can’t help but think of Shilo—my late wife.
She lived in chronic pain for years. A quiet, unrelenting kind that never left her side. She endured it with a grace I never understood until much later. There was no advanced surgery waiting for her. No miracle implant. Just slow decline and the unbearable weight of knowing that even our best technology couldn’t save her.
My pain was structural—bones, joints, mechanics. Hers was systemic, internal, and ultimately terminal.
Technology rebuilt me. It couldn’t save her.
And that truth lives deeper than any titanium rod ever could.
I think about her now as I try to walk again. As I push through the stiffness and the hurt, I hear her in the back of my mind. She would’ve teased me for being half-machine. She would’ve winced when I did, and then offered me one of her warm, exhausted, crooked half smiles—the kind that carried so much love even when her body was breaking. I was lucky, I met a rock star medical doctor who, for some reason, seems to have fallen for me, another strange turn of fate I would never have imagined. I would have never been able to navigate the corporate medical systems, finding the proper procedure and specialist, who would take a chance on me.
There’s an irony here I can’t ignore.
I’m a writer who’s spent his career imagining dystopias and distant futures, crafting worlds of artificial intelligence, cyborg soldiers, and machines that dream of being human. I never thought I’d join their ranks.
But here I am, titanium-laced and 3d printed and walking into an uncertain future—as the real world begins to tilt toward collapse. Climate breakdown, authoritarianism, misinformation, systems fraying at every edge. The kind of stories I once wrote as warning signs are now breaking news.
And me? I’m a cyborg. Not to transcend humanity, but to remain in it. To hold onto movement. To remember what it feels like to be alive in a body that still aches, but endures.
Because survival—like grief, like love—is painfully human.
And sometimes, it’s built one bolt at a time.
~ JVT
