An old posting that might help the Newbies of this club.

• by Christmmpace
• 2009-02-11 02:02:56
• Coping
• 1720 views
• 1 comments

I got my PM in 2001 and the first year took some getting use to it. I got out of the hospital and recovered really well. I was back to work in a month and things seem to have been normal and going great. Until I was running and something really strange happened. I was running in a soccer field and going into the third lap I felt my heart pumping stronger then I'm use to. I felt as though my heart was going to come out of my chest and run ahead of me. I dropped to my knees and raised my left arm up, why, I don't know, but it helped the strong palpitations. I was so afraid of what that was, I rushed home and call my Cardiologist and explained the event, he told me to come in and we'll check my pacemaker setting. I went in and they said, "Everything seems to be okay". Trusting my Doctor I went home and felt better no strong palpitations. After that night for about five years around the same time I kept getting shocked and it was so bad at times it would wake me up right out of bed. I went on living as though this feeling was part of having a pacemaker. Not knowing much about how they worked I dealt with the painful shocks for some time, five long years of the same old thing, every day! Finally! I went to a different Cardiologist and I explained again what I was going through and they couldn't figure it out. The new Cardiologist sent me to a Electrophyisist and I told him what I was experiencing and he was so upset with the Pacemaker Tech at the other offices. He told me that the problem was an internal testing parameter that needed to be turned off. My Pacemaker is a Medtronic Kappa 700 DR and has a feature that allows the pacemaker to test the leads, so the long five years of shocking was completely stop in one setting change, that setting change was a daily test that the Pacemaker was programmed to do at a set time. I gave my thanks to Dr. Nader Ghally and his staff, great job guys!
I wrote this for a lady who was getting shocked and was trying to explain these occurrences to her family members..........I hoped it helped.

Christmmpace
James