Life With A Pacemaker

I am scheduled to get the pacemaker implanted on January 20th, and I am hopeful that it will help my heart to work better again.
On the 15th, I will have a stress test, or something similar, called a PET scan. They put a radioactive dye in your veins, and then put you in a tube thing and take pictures of the heart.
Then they give you another IV that activates stress , and they take more pictures to see which parts of your heart are working and which are not.

Before, (a long time back) I had the chemical stress test where they just put a chemical in to induce stress and measure it with a machine; but this should show them a whole lot more information about my heart than just the plain stress test would do.

After that, they will do an echocardiogram of my heart , which is an ultrasound , and they can determine whether I am in heart failure by measuring my EF %(ejection fraction). Under 50 is considered to be in heart failure.
If my EF%is low, then the cardiologist will also add a special extra wire that helps stimulate the bottom part of my heart.

I probably won’t see my doctor between now and the procedure, but they might call me with some of the test results, or if there is something they find where my doctor would need to talk with me again.

After the procedure, I have to keep my left arm down for about the first month, so Mr. Bobby is going to be the designated driver, and I have to learn how to get into the tall 4x4 pickup without using my left arm.
We have a small step stool, so I will practice getting in and out of the truck for the next couple of weeks, and then I should have it down pat by the time I need to actually get in and out that way.

 

I have known several people who have done very well with a pacemaker, and I'm sure I know many more who I don't even know have a pacemaker. When I was still known as a paramedic, people would feel the need to tell me these things, but that's been a couple of decades now. No doubt, pacemaker technology has even improved considerably.

 

Thank you for all of the prayers and well-wishes ! I have heard a lot of good things about pacemakers, too, and I have a lot of faith in this doctor. He is an electrophysiologist, so this is the part of heart function that he specializes in, and he did the convergent procedure and my ablation also.
Dr. Tabereaux looks like a teenager, but he isn’t, and he is both thorough and caring. He did the first Convergent procedures here in Huntsville, and mine was one of the first ones they did here.
https://www.al.com/breaking/2013/12/huntsville_hospital_first_in_s.html

When my heart was at its worst, my EF was at about 23%, @Frank Sanoica ; but with healthy diet and exercise after the ablation, it gradually came up to about 47%. I don’t know where it is now, but will know after the new echo on the 15th of this month.
When they do the procedure, they will also be removing the heart monitor implant that I have had for the last couple of years.
The battery should be about dead by now anyway, and the pacemaker will transmit all of the information to my doctor that they need.

I should only be in the hospital overnight, according to my doctor, @Holly Saunders . This is a much less invasive procedure than the ablations were, and I am really glad of that part !

I found a pacemaker forum , and registered, so I should be able to learn a lot from other people who have had this procedure already.
Since several other people here also have pacemakers, I will post a link to the website , in case anyone else is interested in sharing experiences about pacemakers.
The website is https://www.pacemakerclub.com , and they have other things besides just the forum; but I have not totally explored the website yet.

Here is a picture of my doctor, who will be doing the pacemaker installation.

 

Are you able to see what it shows, @Al Amoling , or is the information just sent to your doctor ? I might be wrong, but my understanding was that my pacemaker can send information to my doctor anytime i am home and near the device.
The little monitor implant that I have been wearing has a box transmitter with its own WiFi, and it sends information once a day to the company that makes the device, and they can alert my doctor when they see something that needs attention.
There is also a little hand-held device that i can put up to my heart and it will send the information right away, and that is for when I feel that my heart is doing something different than it should be doing.

I have been seeing a different cardiologist for the last 1-2 years because he was at the same office as our regular family doctor, but we have changed providers this year , and I am going to go back to Dr. Tabereaux again.

 

I was reading through the information from my last doctor visit because I wanted to see what he had found from the ekg from wearing the heart monitor for those several days last month, that helped him to determine that I needed the pacemaker.
I have an online portal that I can use to access the information from my visits and any tests that they do, so that is where I was looking.
It turns out that I have had a sinus node problem for some time (besides the things that I knew about) and it has been getting gradually worse as time goes by and I get older.
I have been diagnosed with what is called “sick sinus syndrome:, and according to what I read online about that problem, the normal treatment is installing a permanent pacemaker.