Experiences sharing

Hai,
I m peacemaker inplant on 2010, I suffer from sick sydrome or irregular heartbeat, my heart beat below 60/minute and when i sleep, it will stop more than 5 second after few doctors dicisions,
I agreed to implant my metronic ADDR01,At first year after six months, i can still doing all the routine jods,everything perfect.
2 years i scare that i might be fainted if i goes for active activities,so i quit my favorite game and only Daizi.
Is there anybody have this experiences that I have a scare feeling when i travel alone, i just worry i might fainted .Do i have to see the psaicologist Dr on this issue?
When i go to bed, I always can feel my heart beat all the time, it make me very difficult asleep even through im very tired!
Hope some one can give some advices
thank and sorry for spelling mistake
simon

6 Comments

Welcome, Simon

by donr - 2012-08-10 09:08:39

Ignore the spelling - we do when your first language is not English!

What is happening to you is not unusual for PM Hosts.

It is a combination of physical AND psychological events coming together and making life miserable for you.

You say that you had 18 months of feeling good - "everything perfect." This tells us that at least in the beginning, your PM & heart were working working well together.

Let me summarize what I think you said so we can be clear on what is happening:

1) At the two year point, you became scared that you would faint and quit your favorite game. I am not sure what "Daizi" means. Please explain that to me.

2) Next you say you are scared when you travel alone. You worry that you might faint.

3) When you go to bed you cannot go to sleep because you feel your heart beat.

My answer: What you are feeling is called ANXIETY and is not at all uncommon for new PM (Pacemaker) Hosts. IT often starts much sooner than this, so you have been lucky for 18 months.

Here is what happens. Your heart has failed you electrically in its control system. It sounds like your heart pumps well and you have no valve problems. It is just that the part of your heart that controls heart beat and regularity has failed. The solution for this kind of heart problem is a PM.

It does not matter what language you speak or what ethnic group you come from, when your heart fails you, it causes uncertainty, fear and anxiety. Anxiety affects all people in the manner you mentioned and its symptoms can be exactly what you feel.

For that first 18 months, you felt confident that the PM was making your heart work correctly. At that point, some little event occurred in your heart beat that your mind sensed & suddenly made you aware of your heart beating. That one small event made your mind alert for any future unusual events. Of course they occurred. Even people with absolutely normal heart beats have little events occur - they just do not sense them because they believe that their heart beat is regular and never varies, but it does. Now that you have had your heart fail you, you are far more sensitive to what is happening to your heart beat and feel every little unusual event. The anxiety this causes makes you even more alert for unusual heart beats and it grows and grows till you feel the way you do now - scared.

Being alone away from people who know what is happening to you is a real trigger for feeling anxiety. I assume that you have family. When you are with them or associates at work who know you have a PM, you are relaxed and comfortable. You know that if anything happens to you they will know what kind of help to get you. When you are traveling alone, everyone around you is a stranger and does not know what to do to help you if anything goes wrong with your heart or PM.

Feeling your heart beat when you lie down to go to sleep is also not unusual. What happens is that it is very quiet, very dark and nothing is happening around you to divert your attention from your heart beat. You are in a situation known as "Sensory deprivation." There are no external events to divert all your senses (touch, hearing, sight, smell, taste). So what happens? You become "Hyper-alert," meaning far more alert than when out of bed. All of a sudden you can hear and feel your own heart beating. And, that scares you while you lie there waiting for that one unusual beat that you want to think means your heart is failing you again.

Here is something you can do tonight to help the sleeping problem: Leave a small light on somewhere to remove the total darkness from your bedroom. Leave a radio or TV set turned on very low to make a background noise. These two background conditions should divert your sight & hearing away from your heartbeat and provide something for them to focus on.

By any chance, do you sleep on your left side with your left ear on a pillow? For some strange reason, your heart beat becomes easier to hear under those conditions - even more than with the right ear on a pillow. Also - when you lie on your left side, your heart sags against your ribcage more and you can feel its beat against the ribs. (Remember that your heart is not centered in your body, but is essentially on the left side.) It does not take much for your mind to sense the heart beat when it is in a hyper alert state, so removing these two simple situations can help some people.

Now, the anxiety you feel while being alone MIGHT need the help of a psychiatrist who specializes in people with heart problems. Or, at least understands what their special circumstances are. For PM Hosts, the general cause of the anxiety is the fear that their heart will fail again and that the PM will fail, also, at the same time. Or, to put it another way - the PM will not do its job and allow the heart to fail as it did in the past.

I assure you - the PM you host is far more reliable than your heart. At least in the short time range of the next ten years. It has the same digital computer technology in it that put men on the Moon and took the recent Mars lander successfully to that planet. Your PM has several back up capabilities to protect you from failure. As ridiculous as this might sound - the PM is more reliable than the leads that take its signals to the heart to make it function! There are millions of PM's in people world-wide and they have an outstanding record of reliability.

The human mind is a wondrous thing. Like the digital computer on your desk or your laptop, it functions at two levels. You computer is working on your problems and displays its progress on the screen. Meanwhile it is working on all sorts of other problems in the background & you do not even realize that it is doing it. The mind functions the same way. The two levels of functioning are called the Conscious and Sub-Conscious minds.

The Conscious mind is the one we work with all the time doing all the things necessary to live and work. The Sub-Conscious mind works in the background on all the things necessary for survival, and we do not even realize it is doing it. Most important, it works with mostly NEGATIVE issues and brings them up to the Conscious mind when it thinks something threatens your survival. In that way, it is a nasty, mean little thinker that does nothing but cause trouble (anxiety). It constantly whispers in your ear thoughts like "Your PM might fail you, and you are out here all alone with no one to help you if it does!". Or "Listen to your heart beat - it might do something wrong and you will be asleep and die from it!" It comes to the surface when your Conscious mind is inactive or not distracted by its thoughts. It is the Sub-Conscious mind that senses the nearby Cobra or Krait in the grass and makes you suddenly aware that you must do something to survive. In that case it momentarily has control of your body till the Conscious mind can shift gears and handle the threat.

In the case of the PM, your Conscious mind must become dominant over the Sub-Conscious and teach it that the PM is good; is reliable; and will NOT let you down. That takes time. Time to gain Conscious knowledge that the PM is as good as I say; time to convince the Sub-Conscious that all is well. That may take professional help.

Don

test

by simonkuah - 2012-08-13 07:08:30

testing

Thank Don

by simonkuah - 2012-08-13 09:08:32

Really appreciate on yours comments.
Tai-Chi is slow movement kung fu.
You are absolutely correct that my room were dark and i slept on left side left head. I will put a light or some things that change my suitation.
Anxiety really make me lost or miss occasion and wonderful time with fellows! Sometime, i have to cancel my personal gathering with friends just afraid that i might happening fainted. You are true that i must reliable on PM , I do understand the Sub-conscious mind after i discuss with my son about the issue.
Last feb i went to changmai alone , It really ended up horrible dream, i was so scare that they is no enjoy at all. my recent trip to London with family was much more comfortable. I M married with 3 children. WE stay In Kuala Lumpur.
Don,Are you a Doctor? you dont mind, yours comments really reward a lot of PM hosts.
regards
simon Kuah

Malaysian Anxiety

by donr - 2012-08-14 10:08:06

Simon: Glad my comments helped you out.

No, I am not a Doctor - I am an electrical Engineer who has had nearly 35 years of experience with anxiety. My anxiety is NOT from my pacemaker (PM), but comes from a tour I spent in Viet Nam in the US Army. The effects and symptoms are identical, however, so I have a pretty decent understanding of the psychological effects of PM's on their hosts.

I have never bee to Malaysia, but know your geography & where it is. I wondered if you lived in Kuala Lumpur.. The closest I have ever gotten is Bankok, Thailand.

I recognize Tai-Chi - I've seen it practiced by Chinese when I visited Taiwan - very graceful and relaxing. Also appeared to take great concentration by the practitioner. I hope that you have continued to practice Tai-Chi. It should help you gain control over your sub-conscious mind. The concentration and focus it requires should help you relax and reduce stress and anxiety. It is something you apparently enjoy doing. To give up something that enjoyable just reinforces the control your sub-conscious has.

Simon, your comments on the effect that anxiety has had on your social life with fellows and other gatherings is absolutely common. The worst part is that if you give these pleasures up, the sub-conscious wins again & it makes you feel worse. It is necessary that you do these things. But since it has gotten so bad, you must start out small and as you gain small successes & confidence, you can increase the size of the events you attend.

One of the aspects of anxiety is that you always want to do something to relieve it. So you take the easiest approach that gives you relief - you AVOID the activity that causes anxiety. After a while, you are doing nothing but staying at home being a recluse (a person who shuns all others and stays by themselves.)

To successfully defeat anxiety, you must FACE it and acknowledge its existence and refuse to give in to it. You do this by understanding exactly what the cause is and learning all you can about it and triumphing through superior knowledge about the cause.

In your case, you know the cause is your PM and its associated effects on your life. You fear that the PM will fail you when you most need it and that you will faint in public, be embarrassed and require medical treatment. Also, that this will happen when you are with strangers who do not know what the cause is.

Please go back and read the section where I tell you how reliable a PM is. learning that and BELIEVING that is the key piece of information you need to support your conscious mind in its battle for control. Let me give you several examples of just how reliable your PM is - there are at least 6 members of this web site who are TOTALLY dependent on their PM to live. They are paced 100% of the time and have been for over 30 years in one case. I am paced nearly 100% of the time; a man named ElectricFrank is paced 100% of the time. Janetinak is paced 100%; TraceyE is paced 100%. Of all these people, I am the shortest time with a PM - 9 years. I would name more members if I could remember their names. They are THAT numerous. PM's just do not fail their hosts!

Yesterday I was talking with a young woman here in my town - her husband's father has been totally dependent on a PM for 15 years now. She told me that he felt his heart do "Funny " things. She called them "Flip-Flops," saying that his PM was failing him because those "Flip-Flops" were his heart skipping beats. She would not believe me when I told her that was impossible - that if he had a PM, it would NOT LET the man's heart skip a beat. But I am correct - he is feeling something else that his heart is doing that the PM cannot control. Do not feel afraid if you feel your heart do something unusual or weird. Before you had the Sick Sinus Syndrome and the slow heart beat, you had weird things happen all the time - you just never sensed them. You may feel them more now because you are more aware of your heart beat. So - ask your cardiologist about what you feel. I am confident that he will examine you, look at the data in your PM, perhaps do an ECG and tell you it is nothing to worry about. That is all necessary to gain confidence in your PM.

If you make the small changes in your bedroom conditions, it will not help you immediately - it may take several nights before it helps. If your anxiety is as bad as I think, it will not go away without a fight!

I fully understand the travel issues. I have been in a situation where I HAD to travel for business - alone it was very stressful. I know the feeling. At the height of my anxiety problems I had to go on a trip alone, for two weeks. I had great difficulty sleeping. I did not have my PM at that time and I feared having a heart attack alone in a hotel room at night. My solution was to get out of bed, get dressed and sit in the hotel lobby! At least if I fell over, someone would see me and call the hospital.

During that period, I also traveled with my wife and family. That was fine - no anxiety.

Simon, one last thought. I have written this from the experience of an American. I realize that there are significant differences in our societies and how we interact with others. Some of what I have written may not work within your society - I know that. I do not know if you are Chinese or Malay - I know that may also make a difference in how you face these kinds of problems. I suggest that you find a psychologist or psychiatrist who speaks and reads enough English to read this and at least explain it in terms and applicability to your society. I have lived enough years in Asia to know that we all are different and require different approaches to the same problems.

If I can help you any more, do not hesitate to write and ask! That's why I am here.

Don

hai Don

by simonkuah - 2012-08-15 07:08:34

Yes , Don,I m a chinese and i really want to get out from anxiety and meet my own society, I will listen to yours advices by starting from small group.I m really happy this 2 days after i read over the rival between the sub conscious and conscious.
As my room , i just putting a small light, seem it wont help much , may be i will put some music ( my wife refuse) that why still struggling !
Thank for sharing those incident on how reliable this PM device.I have to face it even stronger after i read both mail from you.
Thank you very much , i will write to you after i seen the psychologist Dr first and see how the results
Regards
simon kuah

Post will disappear in two days

by donr - 2012-08-16 11:08:43

Simon: Ypur post will disappear off the bottom of the list in two days. It will go into the archives, so will still be available.
If you want to ask me a question, please send me a message via the Private Message system.

To do that:

1) Go to the entry in the left column on the top of the screen. Find "Member List." Click on that. A new screen will come up.

2) Type my name - "donr" in the block labeled "User Name."
Click on "Search".

3) A new screen will come up. Scroll down to my name in RED. Click on it. A new screen will come up.

4) Click on "Send a Private Message to donr."

5) A screen will come up that will allow you to send me a message.

Type it in & send it - I will receive an e-mail notifying me that it is available.

Don

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