His Heart Whirs Anew

"Being a Jungian psychologist, I would describe myself as less intuitive. More of a thinking, more rational, less intuitive person. Less sure if I can do things by inspiration."

No one really knows why Houghton has this trouble -- whether it is the machinery, or the drugs, or depression, or advancing age, or the lingering effects of major surgery, or a lack of hormones secreted by the heart, or even that for hundreds of thousands of years, human brains have been optimized by having their oxygen delivered in pulse-driven spurts, not constant pressure.

Given his training, however, Houghton naturally reaches for psychological explanations. "The procedure lands you in a position that no one has ever pioneered -- what it does to a person as a person. You're an invented person trying to cope with it, trying to deal with the emotional context of it."

He says he can see that those close to him "can do without you. So you protect yourself against that knowledge. You're not very central to their lives any more. This means you're much more cautious about how you use your emotions. You try not to invoke them. You become coldhearted. The thought doesn't agree with me, the fact that it happens. But I don't know what to do about it."

His grandsons "are gorgeous little boys, but when you come down to it, they're not going to remember you very much. So automatically you sort of think, there isn't anything I can do about this. Not going to get too hurt about it. You give them hugs and the usual things. You just don't feel -- they're not part of my life, you know what I mean?"

There are other issues.

Houghton says he's developed "a careless attitude toward money. You don't care if you've overspent your credit cards or not. If you don't have any time left, you might as well enjoy it. It doesn't go away. You just sort of control it. 'What the hell,' you think, 'if I want something, I'll have it.' "

It's taken him some time to plan more than a day or two into the future. Seven years into this, he says that, with effort, he can now think all the way out to six months.

Also, "the pump brought about some religious crises," he reports. It caused him to think about his devout Catholicism -- "questioning the afterlife. Who knows? These are only priests. They're not very good at being challenged on the subject." Houghton wrote up his thoughts in a book, "The World Within Me."

Five years after the operation he went through a period of clinical depression. "Several times I thought, better off if I wasn't here. Let everyone get on with their lives. I felt I'd like to put an end to it. But choosing the methods puts me off. Feel cowardly about killing yourself."

He saw a psychiatrist about his suicidal thoughts. "He wasn't too worried," Houghton says. "It's a perfectly rational response to a difficult set of circumstances. Wasn't surprised by it. Advised me to try and think about what I was doing. He didn't try to put me off. He challenged me -- 'Are you sure you mean it?' I did mean it, but not sufficient to overcome my fear of the actual process."

He was prescribed antidepressants for 18 months, and was weaned off them six months ago.