HP. Hoodedcobra666 said:
Finally, after 10 hours, Yan opened his eyes.
'You Came too Late'
Two unsteady days after Yan's surgery, doctors switched on his DBS device. As the electrodes activated, he felt a surge of excitement. The current running through his body kept him awake; he said he spent the whole night thinking about drugs.
The next day, he sat across from Dr. Li, who used a tablet computer to remotely adjust the machine thrumming inside Yan's head.
"Cheerful?" Li asked as the touched the controls on the tablet.
"Yes," Yan answered.
Li changed the settings. "Now?"
"Agitated," Yan said. He felt heat in his chest, then a beating sensation, numbness and fatigue. Yan began to sweat.
Li made a few more modifications. "Any feelings now?"
"Pretty happy now," Yan said.
He was in high spirits. "This machine is pretty magical. He adjusts it to make you happy and you're happy, to make you nervous and you're nervous," Yan said. "It controls your happiness, anger, grief and joy."
Yan left the hospital the next morning.
More than six months later, he said he's still off drugs. With sobriety, his skin cleared and he put on 20 pounds. When his friends got back in touch, he refused their drugs. He tried to rekindle his relationship with his ex-wife, but she was pregnant with her new husband's child.
"The only shame is that you came too late," she told him.
Sometimes, in his new life, he touches the hard cable in his neck that leads from the battery pack to the electrodes in his brain. And he wonders: What is the machine is doing inside his head?
