At Last, New Information

I've been pretty busy with surgery for a pacemaker, a colonoscopy (everyone has these?), and lots of doctor appointments lately. (Kim's been pretty busy coming here to drive me home from the surgery and also the colonoscopy about a month later.) I'm doing well, will be seeing my primary care physician tomorrow morning, and the CDD doctor on Thursday 10/23. I want to share with all of you what I learned about a pacemaker. It seems they have come a long way with this. I had a follow-up appointment with Tina, the pacemaker checker about a month ago, and will have another appointment with her in December. This is what I learned. Now the PM (pacemaker, I will refer to it now as PM-a lot shorter). It is indeed implated into my chest on the left side. Tina monitors the activity of my pacemaker on her special computer. When I saw her the first time, she turned her machine on, printing a EKG-like paper, and asked me "What were you doing on August 23?" That question surprised me, and I told her 'I don't remember'. She then said well there was a blip from your PM on that day, but it did not last long, and it's the only one so far, so I'm going to ignore it. I asked her what the machine was doing, and she said that it monitors the PM constantly, and when she turns it on with my name, it prints out a report to date. We discussed that I was shocked to know that my PM was being monitored by her machine all of the time. She said that's normal procedure. She mentioned something about that perhaps in 3-5 years, I would need the battery replaced. I shuttered at the thought, and I asked her if that meant that they were going to have to cut me open again to take the PM out and replace the battery. She said, oh no, it's done on the computer! What a relief! I don't know how that's done, but I'm happy to let the computer handle it. Do you guys find this weird or what?