Hutchinson ? Every night, Helen Borrowman wakes up and listens for a heartbeat.

From the doorway of the room her daughter and granddaughter share, Borrowman listens for the mechanical pulsating of an artificial heart pumping life through her daughter’s body.

Swish-whirl, swish-whirl, swish-whirl. It’s music to her ears.

“We call her our bionic woman,” says Helen.

The story of Robin Borrowman’s life is told through the manmade lines running across her skin. Just below her throat, barely noticeable until she points it out, is the sign of her non-Hodgkins lymphoma, when doctors removed her thyroid gland in search of cancer. On her leg is the zipper-shaped reminder of where doctors took an artery to save Robin’s heart.

And poking above her shirt, running down her abdomen, is the vibrant purple where, in a 10-hour surgery in February, doctors opened up Robin’s chest and gave her a new chance at life.

Little things

Without the artificial heart, Robin probably wouldn’t have lived a whole lot longer after she got here, said Kim Chapman, a registered nurse with the Utah Artificial Heart Program at Latter-day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City. She wasn’t in great shape.

Since she returned home in May, it’s been difficult for Robin, 42, not to smile.

She can’t help it. Even the little things make her happy, she says, because for so long she had no life at all.

Driving a car; shopping at Wal-Mart; talking to the family’s pet parrot; playing with her children. Today, these moments overshadow the bad times, the weeks she had to sleep in a chair in the living room, the stress of lying down too great for her heart.

“I couldn’t go down stairs or up stairs for years,” Robin said. “I’m so tickled because now I can.”

Start of sickness

The problems started not with Robin’s heart, but around it. Cancer, doctors told her, enveloped her heart like a glove.

Robin Borrowman sits at her computer in her Hutchinson home. Borrowman received an artificial heart in February, which is giving her a new chance at life.

In time, chemotherapy and radiation treatments would cure her, but not before the left side of her heart was weakened and damaged.

In January 2001, Robin had her first heart attack. A few months later, she had another. Doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure and said she needed a heart transplant.

But Robin, left breathless by a walk down the hall, wasn’t strong enough to handle the stress of a transplant. Doctors told her she needed to lose weight and speculated that she wouldn’t survive the wait for a donor.

Manmade pump

Today, Robin’s life rests on her hip. Every morning, she straps on a fanny pack and the battery that powers her Left Ventricle Assist Device, and gets ready to step out into the world, three hours at a time.

With her manmade heart, connected to the Heart Mate monitor she wears around her waist, Robin can control the rate, flow and volume of her blood. The device works by taking the blood from the left side of the heart and pumping it back to the aorta, reducing stress on the heart. A driveline tube runs from the 4-inch circular device to outside the body and connects to the battery and control system.

“As in Robin’s case, these pumps can be used as a bridge to a transplant, or as a permanent medical therapy,” said Chapman, Robin’s nurse. “It allows the patients to live a high quality of life, where before they were at home lying in bed all the time.”

For the past three months, since her surgery on Feb. 11, Robin has been learning to live with her new heart and its continuous swish-whirl. She has grown accustomed to the extra weight, about 10 pounds, and not being able to take showers. She has learned to take her medical bag, with its extra battery and medication, wherever she goes.

“Now I can walk,” said Robin, who worked for Learjet in Wichita before being laid off in 2001.

“Yeah,” said her father, Bob. “She can outwalk me.”

Precautions

But life, even one freed from the clutches of death and hospital beds, still requires some precautions. Robin’s new heart comes with 21 different prescriptions, which use up most of her monthly income. She is uninsured and living on Medicare.

Every night, her dad puts on a surgical suit — complete with a face mask, hair net and sterilized gloves — to keep clean the hole where Robin’s driveline, 5 inches above her hip, exits the body.

Robin’s children Levi, 10, and Shelby, 11 have been trained for emergencies. Even if the batteries fail, even if the electricity goes out, they know they can keep their mom alive with a handheld heart pump.

Next step

Now that she has her life back, Robin is wondering if she’s willing to put it all on the line again. Her new heart, her new life, came with a warranty. In two or three years she’ll have to get it replaced. Originally, the manmade heart was deemed a temporary solution, an extension on life until she was ready for a transplant. Now, she’s not so sure.

“It’s a tough decision,” Robin said. “They can replace (an artificial heart), but they can’t just replace a real heart. The body could reject it; it’s not guaranteed to work.”

But even as she faces that decision, Robin says she knows she has to try. Doctors have told her she needs to lose weight and increase her endurance, something she plans to do, now that she can.

After struggling so hard to get to this place, she knows she can’t forget it’s only a resting place, not a destination.

“Before, I couldn’t do anything,” Robin said. “But I’ve been busy every day since I’ve been back. It’s like I got this whole new life.”