YIKES!!!

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail from the University of Kansas Health Sciences System. I didn’t think too much about it until I opened it. At the top of the page, sort of like a memo it said:

Cardiovascular Medicine – Heart Rhythm Management

My eyes scanned the letter to the bottom of the page to see which cardiologist it was from. And there was the name of the cardiologist who implanted the defibrillator into my chest cavity in April 2022.

I continued to read the letter and saw this heading:

Device Alert Letter: Important message regarding your cardiac implantable device

Now that is something you really don’t want to see in print, at least I didn’t. The following paragraphs were not much more heartening that that heading despite that they were neither in bold nor italics.

Your implanted defibrillator is designed to deliver high-energy shocks to terminate an abnormal fast heart rhythm should one occur. Boston Scientific has informed us that under rare circumstances, the device’s ability to detect those rhythms may become disabled for a 24 hour interval during which time a shock therapy may not be delivered if needed.

The company has reported that to date, there have only been three (3) reported occurrences of that behavior out of 136,000 patients with these devices. If this were to occur, the likelihood of dying from this event is estimated to be 1 in 46 million at 1 year (0.000000002%).

So . . . I called today and set up an appointment on the same day that I have an echocardiogram in a couple of weeks scheduled by my everyday cardiologist. What they will do is update the software in the ICD in order to correct the potential for death.

I guess it might be good to pray that in the next eighteen days, I don’t become the fourth out of 136,000 patients!

And so continue the adventures in Geriatric Land.