"Made a significant difference to my life"

I am a 69 year old male, retired, who has recently moved from Cardiff to East Devon. I had a pacemaker implanted in Q4 2019 and the battery was coming to the end of its life.

The two hospitals agreed that the "box change" would be managed by Cardiff as their last contribution to my health care before handing me over to Exeter, and the procedure was performed on mid September. When a pacemaker battery is approaching end of life the hospital actually removes the original implanted device and installs a brand new one which is then attached to the three wires that transmit the packing signals to the heart itself. This takes advantage of up to date technology in the new device which will then last another 6-7 years.

All went well (I was fully awake as this procedure is conducted under a local anaesthetic) until the surgeon was closing the wound when a staff member in the theatre announced that they may have programmed the new device incorrectly. Fast forward two days, when I was back home in Devon, and my wrist monitor confirmed that the pacemaker had been incorrectly programmed with settings that had been superseded last April, which needed to be corrected without delay.

After discussions between me and the two physiology departments I presented myself to the Exeter Cardiac Physiology Suite, a week after the Cardiff mess up, and met "Elisabet" - the technician tasked with recalibrating the device (All done remotely, no need to open the wound to jigger about with the new device that was already in my chest).

I had expected her to simply reprogram the device to the settings used by Cardiff on the day before the box change; but she quietly explained that as this was the first time I had been seen by the Exeter Cardiac team she would investigate the way that my heart was working and would try to optimise new settings to improve its performance in case there had been any changes to its functionality since the last programming review.

An hour and a half later, and with the help of another technician whose name I do not know, she advised me that the settings had been completely changed and she hoped in would help.

Now for the fun part. I have been in heart failure since May 2019 and have been closely monitored by the Heart Failure Team in Cardiff through the last 6+ years. I have been taking a dozen pills a day to manage my condition. 

Last April I caught a horrible virus which made me really ill and I started retaining fluid that the heart could not dispose of through the normal mechanism of urination. To add insult to injury, at just the time that I was changing care from Cardiff to Exeter, my kidneys started complaining and the Exeter Heart Failure team had to withdraw one of my meds and to reduce the strength to another to mitigate potential damage to my kidneys.

This combination of events and issues caused me to put on 14kg of excess weight though retention of fluid that the heart could not clear from my body between April and September.

The day after I started losing weight as the heart was now starting to expel  some of the excess fluid build up under its own steam and, as I write this mid October, 24 days later, I am 9, yes, 9 kg lighter than I was when Elisabet finished recalibrating my pacemaker. If I continue to lose ±375mg of fluid per day then I should be back to my "Dry Weight" by the end of this month and my kidney function has also improved markedly; and all because Elisabet took the time to investigate and recalibrate the settings of my pacemaker on her own initiative.

I wish to thank her and her unnamed colleague and to shout her name from the rooftops; and I hope they name a ward after her! My change in demeanour, energy, my mood and my overall well being have improved out of all recognition due entirely to the efforts of this talented lady and her colleague and it proves once again how the staff working at the pointy end of health care in the NHS can make a significant difference to the lives of their patients.