Thursday, July 4, 2019

Be Still My Heart

When is the last time you had an experience that made your heart race?  OK, some things are best kept private but life gives us plenty of opportunities to make that personal pump surge into motion and sound the alert to all the valves and switches to get ready for some serious action.

Let me share a recent event that got my heart pumping in moon-shot velocity.

Three or four months ago when I moved into my lodging at Russellville Park I was issued a small name tag that I was told to wear whenever I was moving about in the public areas.  It would help the servers at the restaurants to charge my account for meals and also help fellow residents to get to know me.  I always tried to remember to wear my name tag.  It was an attractive gold plate that attached to whatever I was wearing by a magnetic bar lined up with the name bar from inside the garment.

After doing my alternate day workout at the gym and returning home I discovered I had forgotten to remove the name tag from my shirt before leaving home and as I took the tag off I noticed the magnet bar bore this inscription: "DO NOT USE WITH PACEMAKER".

YIKES!

I have been wearing that thing directly over my implanted pacemaker ever since moving into this place.  So I called Dr. Davies, who implanted the pacemaker, and his nurse told me he thought no harm had been done to the device or to me but to definitely keep it away from the pacemaker.  He said he would contact the pacemaker company and they would call me, which they did.  They reviewed my data records and found definite signs of the magnet affecting the device and sending my pulse rate well over 100 many times.  God knows what it did this morning after my pulse-raising workout and then slapping the magnet on top of the pacemaker when I donned my shirt.

The Russellville office apologized for not telling me about the pacemaker issue.  Thanks.

I think I'll light up my Sonos and see if I can find some Lawrence Welk music.

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