[geeks] Health Update

[Michael Schiller]

Hi All.

Just in case any of you noticed I wasn't around lately, I thought I'd 
give y'all an update. As you might know last month I had a heart 
attack, and they had to put another stent in my heart. Well, slightly 
more than a week ago, on Friday night/Saturday morning I started having 
chest pains, so a friend drove me to the hospital (an hour drive, for a 
total of 3 hours from when I first spoke to my friend to getting to the 
hospital), and once there I was quickly taken into the ER. Of course 
they gave me some shit about taking so much time to get to the hospital 
while having a heart attack! While I was waiting for the test results 
to come back my heart decided that it'd beat enough, and stopped. After 
they resuscitated me they told me my heart had stopped for between 20 - 
30 seconds, and they preformed CPR to bring me back. Later in the day 
they preformed another angiogram, and placed an additional 3 stents 
into my heart, and informed me that I needed to have a pacemaker as 
well. Apparently I have a slow/random heartbeat, a condition called 
Bradycardia. The pacemaker was placed on Monday.

I got home on Tuesday, and on Thursday I again had chest pains, and 
deciding not to wait for my friend to drive 1.5 hours to come get me 
(to take me to a Knoxville hospital rather than the local death trap of 
a hospital) I called 911 and had an ambulance come and get me. Luckily 
it was a false alarm, it turns out the chest pains were just from where 
they cut me open, and cut a pouch for the pacemaker to sit in, rather 
than being heart related. (I had finally decided to take some nitro 
after having the pain for a while, and it made the pain go away, 
something that I thought meant it WAS heart related) It turns out that 
while nitro usually means it's heart, it doesn't have to be, so they 
released me, and I went home. Since then I've been doing very little.

I only noticed it a bit, but my friend that took me to the hospital 
says that he's not seen me with this much energy/alertness in a long 
time, and that the pacemaker seems to be making a big help. The doc had 
said that I've probably had this condition for much of my life, and 
said that it could have been easily misdiagnosed as a sleep problem, or 
something else. Normally I have high blood pressure, but after the 
event in the ER they had to give me drugs to get my BP up to the normal 
level, now THAT was something different for me!

Now onto the geeky side of things. The pacemaker they put in me (a 
Medtronic Kappa KDR901 pacemaker that apparently has memory storage 
capabilities, and using an (I assume) inductive coupling they can 
download info on how my heart is doing, how often the unit had to 
regulate my heartbeat, etc. The doc has signed me up with a company to 
do monthly remote monitoring of the pacemaker, and they're sending me a 
pickup unit that will download the data to them via a built-in acoustic 
coupler (so I'm assuming it's a low speed link ala Bell-103).

 From what I've been reading about the pacemaker, the monitoring company 
can actually reprogram the pacemaker thru this link as well (by a 
realtime link with my doc) if it's needed. I haven't received the 
monitoring equipment yet, but I'm really curious if it would be 
possible to hook it up to one of my computers, and see what the 
pacemaker is doing for myself!

And the really big question is: How many geek points do I get for 
having a computer regulated heart? :)

Sorry for the long post.

-Mike
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