a mine in Madagascar

Katherine Standefer has a rare genetic condition that makes her heart go into fibrillation with seemingly little provocation. When a heart is fibrillating, it’s basically just quivering, which means it’s not pumping blood, and one cannot live long without blood on the move. A defibrillator is a machine that shocks the heart back into its regular rhythm. Only in the last couple of decades have doctors figured out a way that a defibrillator can be inserted into the body so that the quivering heart can be shocked back into useful activity immediately, no EMT necessary; you can be hiking in the wilderness and your internal defibrillator will be ready to rescue you, no helicopters, no doctor on the trail. It sounds great. And Katherine Standefer thought it meant her life had been saved. 

It certainly meant her life had been changed.

Katherine Standefer’s medical memoir gets its title, Lightning Flowers, from the aftermath of a lightning strike. It seems that a person struck by lightning may end up with a sort of tattoo as the electricity surges through the body, the patterns of capillaries just under the skin visibly seared close enough to the surface that they look, well, not flowerlike so much as “arborescent,” as the Free Dictionary puts it. Something to show off if you survive, I guess.

Standefer never refers to any lightning flowers of her own, but she does undergo painful electric shocks, which may or may not save her life. 

She becomes curious about where the device came from. Who made it? Standefer even travels to mines in Madagascar to see firsthand where metals essential to the Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) are dug up. There is no unalloyed good in what Standefer learns. Mining, for one thing, is hard on the land, and on the people who depend upon what grows upon the land, the water that flows over and through it, and, of course, mining is extraordinarily hard on the plants and animals whose habitat is ground up.

Nevertheless not all of the change is bad for the people of Madagascar. Some of the people experience the power of the government-like multinational corporation that comes in to run the mining operation and see what a competent government might do for its citizens. Madagascar doesn’t have the kinds of roads, bridges, schools, or power plants that, suddenly, people see can exist, as the mining company seemingly drops such things from the sky. 

Katherine Standefer describes contrasts between those who have been helped, those who have been harmed, and those whose lives have seemingly remained the same. They all have opinions. “Perhaps the source of the heartbreak was this: however much a Western presence in these towns created strife, it also came with a brief bright hope — that someone, at long last, would accountable for improving their lives.”

source:

Lightning Flowers: my journey to uncover the cost of saving a life

by Katherine E. Standefer

2020. Little, Brown Spark, New York