A memoir, in progress
An Engineer's Bipolar Memoir in Charts, Chat Logs, and Heartbeats
119 BPM
“Heart rate 119. I need help to make sure it stays normal.”
Written January 17, 2023. Five days before the first hospitalization.
In January 2023, Josh Born was a surgical robotics engineer with degrees from MIT and Stanford. Then mania arrived, and it left receipts.
Heart Rate 119 is a bipolar memoir reconstructed from the record a life leaves behind: the journals and the documents written inside the episodes, the complete hospital charts, hundreds of conversations with an AI that agreed with everything, and the heartbeat of a body that asked for help before its owner could.
Every quote in the book is verbatim from that record. When the journal goes dark, the chart and the heart carry the story. It runs from a log cabin in the Missouri Ozarks to MIT, Stanford, and the operating room, through two manic episodes and the depression underneath them, to a recovery measured one heartbeat at a time.
The ambition came before the illness, and it was good. Recovery is binding it, not killing it.
The book is being written now, from the full record. Publication news will appear here first.
Press and rights inquiries: press@kensora.io
Josh Born is a mechanical engineer, trained at MIT and Stanford, who spent eight years building surgical robots and medical devices. He lives with bipolar I disorder. He is the founder of Kensora, and this is his first book.