My Story (Kinda long)

• by litmachog
• 2008-02-27 02:02:41
• ICDs
• 2317 views
• 7 comments

I had a pacemaker/defib inserted back in 2003. This past December, after receiving the famous Medtronic Recall notice, I visited with my doctor concerning the recall. The office read my pacemaker and there is a particular code that it reads (not sure what it was) and they are looking for a reading greater than 1,200 to indicate that there is a fracture in the lead. Mine was sitting at a little over 400 so I was ok.

On New Years day, just walking across the living room, my defibrillator started shocking me. It proceeded to do this for 6 times. By the time the 6th shock occurred, I was laying out in my hall way by the front door. I didn't know that it was set to time out after 6 shocks.

We called 911 and were carried to the hospital. After being there for a couple hours, believe it or not, the emergency room doctor was going to just send me home as they couldn't find anything. I questioned why they weren't going to read my pacemaker prior to sending me home and he said that he didn't think about it.

After Medtronic came to the hospital to read it, they confirmed that there were no heart issues but that it WAS due to the recall.

I was scheduled to have them go in to replace the bad lead on the 4th but one of the pieces of equipment in the hospital was not working so they had to put it off until the 7th.

During the procedure, they attempted to pull the bad lead out but it had alread fused itself to another lead so they just capped that bad lead off. They tried to get another lead down to the heart in the same place and were unsuccessful. They even cut a hole in my neck close to the juggler vein to attempt to go through a vein there.

So they then pulled the hardware out and placed it on the right side of my heart, created a tunnel underneath my collar bone to run the two good leads through to the new hardware and inserted the new lead from there down to the heart.

After another 2 days in the hospital, I was finally able to come home. A week later, I'm back at work and doing wonderfully.

I'm now receiving all those WONDERFULLY EXPENSIVE medical bills and am anxious to see how much of this Medtronic will be paying for.

Anyone else here have an incident from your bad lead or am I the 1st one here?

Take care and may God bless you all.