Get pacer/defibrilator checkup, how ofter, where,

• by KarenMI
• 2009-09-12 07:09:59
• Checkups & Settings
• 3542 views
• 6 comments

Any tried and true suggestions for interviewing for a cardiac doctor?

How much should it cost for a check up for pacer-defib and what questions to ask to find a good doctor to do this?

How often should this be done? Is a year too long a time?

Hubby has a St Jude pacer-defirbrillator since 2006, no shocks yet from it.

We had an overall checkup at the GP's last week, all ok on paper.

It has been a year since hubby's last pacer/defib machine checkup. How often should this be done? We were unable to locate the right kind of phone to do any phone in checkups, so the hospital took away the monitoring device that they had given us in order for us to connect for a checkup from home. The hospital has been taken over by others, we don't know where to go next.

Now I am confused. We have no local cardiac doctor: Of two that we tried in the past: The one doc wanted cholestoral to be 99 or lower, and gave us a phamplet so we could see 99 was the number to go for. (since Hubby's was at 101, the doc put him on Lipitor. Chlolesterol was apparantly never the problem,) We discontinued Lipitor when he got severe muscle pains, and took CoQ10 and the pain subsided. The doc didn't like that we refused the statin drugs, and we have not been back to him. We haven't burned the bridges, but haven't been back. That cardiologist is the head of the local hospital Cardiology dept, and his office always requires a two hour wait at minimum whenever we have had an appointment to go there. Hubby will not go back. I think the doc may be ok, but he is just too avid at pushing statin drugs. He didn't know what a CRP blood test was, which I thought was odd, since C-reactive Protien tests for inflammation and seems to be a common heart blood test everywhere else we've been. Am I wrong?

We went to another recommended doctor, and his nurse couldn't take a blood sample after 5 tries, so she sent in another assistant who also couldn't draw blood. By that time we packed up to leave, still hadn't seen the doctor., My hubby's arms were hamburger, the doctor then sailed in and said we needed to sign up for relaxation classes at 60 dollars a pop, and said he wouldn't see my Hubby or be available for questions unless he had blood drawn...so we never did get the checkup. (Hubby doesn't usually have trouble with having blood drawn, it was just those 2 nurses. No one at that location was friendly, and they billed us for 2 years for blood work before they realized that they never drew the blood).

He has just had a complete blood test done by LabCorp and the LabCorp people are super at what they do.) His latest cholesterol is 131 now, 3 years after the pacer-defib. Our GP accepts the LabCorp results without a problem, and all looks pretty good on paper.

Could someone explain what goes on during a pacer/defib checkup? Can we contact St Jude for a location and checkup? Does he have to go to the hospital for a checkup?

The last time the nurse said he had about 3 years of battery left, and was good, but that was less battery than they estimated should have been.

I am thinking that something should be adjusted in the rhythm of the pacer/defibrillator but we had two bad experiences with the local cardiac doctors.

The hospital that we had good experiences with and good care has been taken over by a large conglomerate, we don't know where the docs went that helped us then.

Any suggestions are welcome, we are going to jump back in with doctor shopping soon. Sorry for the long post, maybe I needed to write the problem down so I can find my own answer.