How do I know whats right?

I am a 40 year old female and have had my pacemaker fitted for 10 days. During the Operation (implantation on the left hand side) i experienced a sharp strangling pain in the centre of my throat that spread to my right shoulder. I told the surgeon of this at the time and on discharge the following day was still experiencing pain in this area. During the day I experienced extreme pain in the right side of my neck and shoulder and attended my GP who thought it was tension due to the operation and prescribed pain killers. On The following evening the pain spread to my chest and I had sharp stabbing pains when breathing which caused me great distress and i ended up back in the emergency room. I was discharged the following afternoon once the Consultant had seen me and the diagnosis was nerve damage to the neck caused during the operation. I have now 3 lots of painkillers for excrutiating spasms.
I have been noticing missed beats and palpatations continuing after the Pacemaker was implanted....is this normal or should the skipped beats have been resolved? The hospital say the Pacemaker is in place and working well but no one can reassure me that what i am experiencing is normal.
Has anyone else had similar problems??????????

3 Comments

Somthing Is Wrong

by SMITTY - 2010-12-10 01:12:52


Hello,

Based on my experience and what I see others post here the answer to your question about skip beats is no. I'm on my second pacemaker, having got the first one in 2000. Skip beats palpations, PAC or PVC, were present before and have continued since my pacemakers were implanted.

My most recent guesses, based on what I see other people say, is a pacemaker may even make them worse. I can identify skip beats, but as for the others, I never know which is which and don't really care, except they are all uncomfortable.

One reason for the PM not stopping skip beats and possibly the others as well, is they fool the PM. Now let me explain. Our PM checks to see if the heart's natural PM is going to send an impulse to make the heart beat before it sends one. Some of the beats actually start out as very weak impulses from the heart's natural PM. Theses impulses are so weak they do not make a good heart beat but we can we feel them. Our PM senses them and thinks the heart is going to beat and does not send an impulse and so we end up with an irregular beat that we can feel. There are thousands of settings on a PM and the sensitivity setting(s) can be adjusted to detect some, but not all, of these weak signals.

As for palpations, PAC and PVC my PM does prevent some of them since I had my low set, point raised from 70 to 80. This worked for me but I'm twice your age (81) so I am not suggesting it may be a possibility for you.

As for your the pain, I have to agree with the consultant not that it helps you. My thought is you need to grab that surgeon by the ears and tell him to listen to me or you can listen to my attorney. Something wrong happened. Whether it was unavoidable or not he needs to tell you how and what happened.

Good luck,

Smitty

Thanks

by ellonmj - 2010-12-11 06:12:24

Thank you for your reply Smitty.

Its reassuring to know I'm not imagining it and that the skipped beats and palpitations are 'normal'. I guess the "complications" have concerned me a little with what is supposed to be a straightforward procedure leaving me in a worse state than I was before....

Will speak to the consultant on my next appointment but i am still intrigued to see if the nere damage is a common problem or whether I have just been unlucky.

Great to hear you're on PM #2 and are still, from your eloquent response, full of beans :-D - I'm hoping in that case to get to PM 4 or 5 in the future.

Kind regards



Higher Setting

by mike thurston - 2010-12-11 11:12:11

I had lots of PVCs and had them raise my lower setting to 80 bpm and it seems to help a lot.

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As for my pacemaker (almost 7 years old) I like to think of it in the terms of the old Timex commercial - takes a licking and keeps on ticking.