Frustrated with heart

I had my pacemaker implanted on March 8, 2019, so I am a bit new here. My settings are 60 - 130 for my SSS. My problem is that I have still been having pauses which is the whole reason I got the pacemaker. I went in for my 1 week check and they said that I had no pauses. I am wondering how this very accurate machine could not pick these pauses up. It is not a small amount of pauses either, about 10-20 per minute. They can happen at anytime and last as long as they want. The other problem is that I have atrial tachycardia most of the time as well. As all the doctors have said “sinus node (with SSS) always competing with atrial node (tachycardia) for control of my heart”. As you can imagine this is very tiring and annoying. 

Sorry for the long post. This is all a lot to deal with and I don’t know where else to turn. I am so confused and frustrated with this whole pacemaker thing and how settings work. Thank you all for listening, any insight would be greatly appreciated. I am so glad to have found this group. 

1 Comments

settings

by Tracey_E - 2019-03-18 10:17:19

If your lower limit is 60, that works out to 1 beat per second so the pacer isn't going to let your heart go more than a second without a beat. It can feel like a pause, but it's usually a smaller beat that you aren't feeling. If your pacer is pacing then you are not pausing. Are you using a heart rate monitor? They are easily confused by paced beats and notoriously inaccurate for us, always count manually.

It is normall to take a few tries to get the settings fine tuned. If you are also on meds, then it can take more than a few tries to find a good balance. You're barely a week in, give your body some time to heal and get used to being paced. It's too early to judge. 

 

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I'm 35 and got my pacemaker a little over a year ago. It definitely is not a burden to me. In fact, I have more energy (which my husband enjoys), can do more things with my kids and have weight because of having the energy.