Heartbeat felt in area of pacemaker.

Twitching

by AgentX86 - 2024-06-05 22:59:14

It certainly could be symptoms of your healing, as nerves heal.  It could also be that you're pacing the muscles in the area of the pacemaker.  This is rarely serious but it's worth checking out.  Often, it's usually caused by monopolar leads (the pulse goes from the pacemaker to the heart, then returns through the body, back to the pacemaker). It's possible that the return signal is causing the muscle to twitch. Your position may change the return path for this signal, making it intermittent.

Monopolar pacing isn't all that common.  Usually, the return path is through another wire in the pacemaker's lead, but either can be used.  In this scenareo, though rare, the lead fractured, exposing the wires inside. If this happens, the current leaks out of the lead, again returning back to the pacemaker can.  This can act like monopolar pacing, above. As I said, this is very unusual.

In either case this is certainly not an emergency, unless you're having other symptoms.  Yes, it's something that you should tell your EP about. He should be able to tune your pacemaker to help.  Often they can reduce the voltage, or if it is monopolar, it can be switched to bipolar.

My left ventrical lead is monopolar (no idea why).  At first,  I was having twitches in my sholder.  They went away in short time. They may have tweaked it right from the beginning to stop it.  I didn't know anything about it, at first.

Twitching

by piglet22 - 2024-06-06 13:52:49

April is still early days.

It could just be a nervous twitch that will settle.

As Agent mentioned, leads are either unipolar or bipolar and that determines the current return route from the lead electrode to pacemaker.

Bipolar leads can be programmed to operate as unipolar and that is done sometimes if a bipolar leads fails.

I experienced pectoral and upper arm twitching when my battery went so low, the PM changed mode.

PM induced twitching is quite distinct and follows the heart beat. It's strong enough to move your arm and feels like a static electricity shock.

It might also last some time and mine went on for several hours until one of the technicians was able to tweak the settings of the PM to make it comfortable until the PM was changed the next day.

There is a small chance that the lead is faulty and the bipolar lead has found a new return path.

Whatever the cause, it does need looking into.

If you get it sorted, perhaps you could report back.

Polarity switching

by RioTeresa - 2024-06-11 21:52:03

Hi Coolgram,

I’m sorry to read this is happening to you so early on but it sounds like exactly what started happening to me in April. I thought it was my heart also but the pounding was much too hard & kept waking me up during the night. I finally sent a pacer interrogation report while it was happening (off schedule) so my doctor could see what was going on. They said it a polarity switch had occurred and what AgentX86 describes in his second paragraph above is exactly what was happening. My Atrial lead is fractured and was causing my pacer & muscle to jump horribly, also extremely fast tachycardias, over 350bpm and VT.

This will be my second is lead extraction surgery but these leads are over 13 years old. This is WAY too soon to be happening to you! I’m so sorry. 

If you haven’t done it already, send a pacer report the second it starts again. Then contact your doctor’s office to get in and be seen. I wish you all the best with this! I hope it can be a simple fix in your case.

Teresa ❤️