(Revised/Updated on Sep. 5, 2020)

Pacemaker lost track. (part 2)

It’s been a while for any new post.
Several things had happened again with the pacemaker.

As I mention in the last post, I hope that things would be okay.
And you can guess it already.
It wasn’t.

On the regular days, the heartbeat looked okay.
With every check I did myself, it was at a normal pace.
But during my exercise, we saw it had still gone down below the 50 beats per minute.
Sometimes to 42.
So I contacted the hospital again and told them what we had seen.
We agreed that they would join me at the next session I had in the hospital.

So the next session, they were there with a portable computer to check the pacemaker.
I am not sure if I told you about the “new” feature the pacemaker now has.
They can monitor the pacemaker remotely.
Before you needed to have something like a receiver (shaped like a computer mouse) on your shoulder where the pacemaker is placed.
Then they can connect to it and read out all the data that is needed.

Now, they first put the receiver in the same place.
Then, after it has a connection, they can remove the receiver and they can communicate with the pacemaker remotely.
You cannot go too far from the computer.
Maybe 5 to 10 meters.
But at least,  you don’t need to be “attached” to the computer anymore.

I could do my exercise on the bike and they could see on the computer, in real-time, what the pacemaker was doing.
They saw what was “wrong” or why the heartbeat was dropping.
We agreed that after the session, I would pass by and they would explain it to me.

Again, it was the same thing as last time.
The pacemaker is not responding correctly to pulses and timers.
So it kept on dropping pulses because it thought it was not needed.
Again, after an okay from the specialist, they had changed some settings and I should try and see what it would do now.

For me, things felt okay and on the surface, things looked okay.
Also when I did my checks, it was okay.
Until my next session again.
Again a low heartbeat during my bike session.
So I had told them about this.

As a solution, they told me, that they had contacted the maker of the pacemaker and told them the whole story.
They were told that there are still some hidden settings that they could try.
But they could not do it themself.
Their specialist had to be there to set them.
We agreed that they would join me at one of my sessions and see realtime what was going on.

After a few days, they came.
Again checked what was going on.
It was the same as last time, but now they could change some margins and options to make it work better.

We did some tests and everything looked okay.
The advice was to still keep an eye on it and with every check, also check by hand the pols.
To see if it was regular and not skipping a beat.

For now, it is almost 3 weeks and so far things look okay with the pacemaker.

But at one point I noticed that my weight suddenly went up.
I gained 2 kilos in 2 days.
This is too quick.
So I was advised to take some “pee tablets”
Just to get out the water I was retaining.
My weight should be back to normal in 2 days.

And this was the case.
As far as I can recall, it was one day of bad choices of food.
For lunch 1 and a half BLT with some french fries and mayo.
And for dinner again french fries with some other fried snacks.
All of it had a high salt content, I found out later.
Lessons learned again.