Good morning readers. Saturday is my favorite day of the week, even in retirement, when everyday feels like Saturday. I was remembering how I spent a Saturday, six years ago on January 26, 2013. On that morning I was waking in a hospital bed at Manchester Catholic Medical in Manchester, NH. It was my full day with my new pacemaker.
I felt a lot better when I was getting about 60 heartbeats per minute than with than a paltry 35 thanks to my implanted Medtronic C2RR01. Advances have been made since Earl Bakken created a battery-powered transistorized pacemaker based on an electronic circuit for a metronome. However I do run on battery power and eventually I will need to have the device swapped out. In the 1960s and 1970s, a few pacemaker companies made nuclear-powered pacemakers powered by plutonium-238. Imagine how strange my life would be with one of these.
Thanks for sharing… I had no idea what a post-surgical pacemaker patient would look like–medically I mean. More thanks for the x-ray. I see the pacemaker itself; kind of looks like a keyboard but where does the wire exiting the pacemaker end???? That must have been quite an experience. Poltrack and the Pacemakers! How’s that for a band.
The leads end inside the heart. I have a three lead system, One for monitoring and two for sending pulses to keep things on time. I cropped the photo, but the leads just seem to stop in mid torso. The heart is not visible. The “keyboard” are integrated circuits, the three connectors can be seen on the left side and the glob under the circuits is the battery. When the battery runs out (maybe 5 years or less) they will disconnect the leads and put in a new unit. I plan to wear the old one as a pendant.
John,
In 1995 I worked for a thin film company that made the “chip” for pacemakers. Those things are scrutinized eight ways from Sunday. It was not unusual to not get a single chip out of a batch of 100. They couldn’t have one spec of dust, dent in the coating on the surface of the chip or raised area. They had to be free from all flaws. They were made with perfection to keep you up and running.
I worked a summer at Sperry Semiconductor in Norwalk, CT in the 1960s with the maintenance crew, mowing the lawn and changing light bulbs in the clean room where they made the chips. As you said they had a high rejection rate. The clean room wasn’t all that clean. Maybe it better now with robots instead of people. I’m still amazed at how much technology is in this device. It keeps a log file of my heart beat. The newer ones have bluetooth.