Hello people

I've just joined so I've decided to post a message. It's interesting to see that so many people have a pacemaker as well as me and the only person I know who also has one is my brother.

2 Comments

welcome!

by Tracey_E - 2013-04-20 11:04:54

Glad you found us! It's a nice feeling knowing we aren't the only ones. Since you and your brother both have them, I'm going to guess it's congenital/genetic?

Not like Birthdays

by donr - 2013-04-21 08:04:44

That’s having a PM! There are only 366 possible birth dates in a year, so it is easy to stumble across someone w/ the same b’day as you. Not so w/ PM hosting. There are only a couple million PN/ICD hosts in the US, so w/ a population of 250 million, the probability of knowing another one of us is actually about 1 %, so slightly greater than that of sharing a b’day w/ a randomly chosen stranger.  It should be easier to find another PM host in the general population.  Be interesting to check the stats of a large hosp & compare births on a given day w/ PM/ICD procedures for NEW implants on that same day.

Try having common names - the Emory University hosp system has 6 men w/ the same first & last names as me.  They can only sort us out by B’day.  And I have an unusual name.

We know an ICD host here in Atlanta, where we live. See her frequently, have known her for a good ten yrs, but that’s it!

There is a big slug of PM hosts here, I’ve searched our member list & seen roughly how many we have locally. But, have never actually met one of them. We wander in & out of the same hospitals & cardio offices, but still I have not met one even casually.

Following up on Tracey’s comment - my maternal Grandmother hosted one back in the 70’s & two of my uncles have them now & are in their 90’s, so from that, PM hosting literally gallops in my mother’s family. I learned when my mother died at 94 that she had an arrhythmia, also, that she never told me about. Was on some of the same meds I was, but did not require a PM.

But, by no means are we alone.

Don

You know you're wired when...

Your old device becomes a paper weight for your desk.

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I, too, am feeling tons better since my implant.