You don’t expect to get locked out of your own spine. But that’s exactly what happened when my spinal cord stimulator, a cutting-edge Medtronic paddle implant, suddenly stopped communicating.

No remote access. No settings control.
Just me, my body in full-blown pain mode, and a system that wasn’t responding.

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⚡ Introduction

When you’re in constant pain and your last option is a spinal cord stimulator, you expect that, at the very least, the system works. But what happens when the system itself fails and the people trained to support it vanish into thin air?

This isn’t a metaphor. This actually happened to me.

I was recovering from multiple spine surgeries and managing severe radiculopathy pain with a cutting-edge spinal cord stimulator. A device so new, it hadn’t even been adopted by major Chicago hospitals yet when I moved. Originally implanted at the University of Michigan, mine used the latest paddle system (not the older tube-style stimulator still in use at Rush).

Then one day… nothing. The system wouldn’t connect. I couldn’t access my stim settings. I was stuck, locked out of the very thing managing my pain. And just to twist the knife, my Medtronic rep (who had always been amazing) was on vacation. I had no backup contact.

I called the number provided for emergencies and ended up routed to a department handling medical pumps. Not spinal devices. They didn’t know how to help, didn’t try to transfer me, and ultimately just hung up. The very people who should’ve had escalation protocols in place failed. And I was left to suffer.

But I’m a cybersecurity analyst. Trial by fire is what we do.

In the middle of all this, I decided to stop panicking and start thinking like I was handling a production outage in a SOC.

• System isn’t responding? Treat it like a downed endpoint.
• Communication failure between device and controller? Treat it like a broken authentication or untrusted certificate.
• No logs or diagnostic interface? Time to brute-force the recon manually.

Through sheer determination and tinkering, I figured it out. I re-paired the system manually, without instructions, without support. Pain still flaring, I got the whole interface working again. I restored functionality. Alone. Under pressure. In crisis.

Let’s be clear: This was not a technical support ticket. This was incident response, IRL.

And to make things even more high-stakes, I wasn’t safe at home when this happened. I was sitting in my car, parked at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. My pain was spiking rapidly, and the stim system was my only tool for control. Had I not been able to manually recover functionality, I would’ve been stranded, physically unable to drive home, stuck in that cold concrete parking garage with no backup plan, no help coming, and my entire nervous system screaming at me to do something.

That’s how real this was. No metaphor. No abstraction. Just a broken system, a locked-out interface, and one analyst in crisis mode, determined to regain control before the world closed in.

When things break and support is nowhere to be found, I don’t shut down. I adapt. I troubleshoot. I test. And I get systems working again, because that’s what a cybersecurity analyst does, even when the system in question is wired to your spinal cord.

It’s one thing to say you perform well under pressure. It’s another to prove it when you’re alone in a parking garage, pain climbing by the minute, and still solving a problem no one else could fix. That’s what I bring to the table.

Cybersecurity isn’t just my profession. It’s how I live.

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🧠 Breakdown of the Incident

• I lost all control over the device.
• Couldn’t change settings, couldn’t adjust mA levels.
• Customer service routed me to the wrong department (medical pumps), then hung up.
• My original rep (who knew me, my case, and my device) was on vacation.
• I was left in full-body pain with no support.

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🔧 What I Did

I went into full SOC analyst mode:

• Diagnosed it as a communications failure between the remote and implant
• Knew instinctively it wasn’t a settings issue. It was a pairing failure
• Disabled auto features like Neurosense to simplify troubleshooting
• Manually re-paired the system using the internal interface (without documentation)
• Recovered full functionality, alone, while in pain
• No ER visit, no tech support, no rep needed. Just problem-solving under fire

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🛡️ Cybersecurity Skill Translation

This wasn’t just a medical emergency. It was an incident response scenario with real stakes. Here’s how it maps directly to a SOC environment:

Cybersecurity Concept	Real-World Stim Crisis
Device isolation	Lost communication with neurostim implant
Offline endpoint recovery	Manual re-pairing without tools
Vendor failure mitigation	Rep unavailable, support unhelpful
Incident commander mindset	Pain, pressure, and tactical thinking
Reverse engineering	Understood pairing protocol behavior instinctively
Resilience under stress	No manual, no panic, just execution

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💡 The Takeaway

People talk about incident response like it’s all dashboards and alerts.
But sometimes it’s your own body that crashes, and no one’s coming to help.

I didn’t just troubleshoot a device.
I re-established control over critical infrastructure wired into my spine.

That’s what I bring to cybersecurity.
Composure under pressure. Systems thinking without a manual.
And the refusal to freeze when everything’s on fire.