I wonder why...
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My husband is one of the newbies. Vaxxed, mid-40s, and is scheduled for a pacemaker next month due to 3rd degree atrioventricular block. Of course, I can’t prove it was the vaxx, but the cardiologist and electrophysiologist said this issue is insanely rare for his age.
I know someone who got vaxxed this summer. Now the guy is in his seventies so it could be a coincidence. However, after his second jab he began to get angina. A month or so later he had a triple bypass As he was healing up from surgery he ended up getting Shingles (Herpes Zoster and Shingles are frequently being seen in vaxxed peeps). The shingles was more painful to him than the heart surgery.
My vaxed aunt developed shingles too right after her booster.
Yep
And aids… that surprised me until it didn’t
Anything that stresses your body or mind can provoke shingles.
I'm 50 y/o and this is the first person I've known to ever have shingles.
I have a very dear "aunt"/Godmother type in her 90's who immediately developed shingles in her eye and tested positive for covid within days of getting vaccinated. Definitely almost killed her. This was right when the vaccines were rolled out.
I'm younger than your husband and developed 3rd degree AV block, but not due to anything covid related. I'm surprised they scheduled the pacemaker so far out. They threw one in me within 24 hours of going to the ER.
His was detected by accident during a routine physical. An abnormal heartbeat detected during the physical led to EKG which led to stress test and other tests which led to diagnosis. He actually doesn’t have any symptoms (other than fatigue he’d previously written off that he’s now thinking might be due to this) which they attribute to him being very athletic; I think that’s why they were comfortable making him wait. We have instructions to go to the ER if he starts getting faint, having pains, etc.
If there's no fear of unknown infection, hopefully they have him on high dose Prednisone. If the tissue isn't scarred over yet, those nerves can regrow. Luckily 2 of mine started working again.
The good news, by the way, is that even if those nerves are shot forever, modern pacemakers are really good at replacing them. It's almost flawless. It took my cardiologist a couple weeks to dial mine in because it was a little wonky at first, but it wasn't a big deal; there's dozens of parameters that can be fine tuned. (and it helped that I am an engineer and built my own ECG, because the first week my heart beat was instantaneously alternating between 50 and 100bpm. Sending the dr. a trace of that got me an appointment with him 8AM the next morning!)
Really the only observable downside is that, unlike your nerves, the pacemaker has a programmed upper pulse rate limit. The factory default is something like 155bpm, which works fine for elderly people, but for younger fit people that's pretty low. The cardiologist can crank it up to maybe 190bpm, but they won't want to because it's close to the limit of what the pacemaker can actually do to reliably sequence the heart muscles correctly. This is actually a big deal for usability because, in the case of a straight forward AV block, the sinus node is still working properly and generating your natural atrial pulse rate. The pacemaker is just doing its best to detect the atrial beats and propagating the signal down to the ventricles in place of the damaged nerves. If your natural pulse rate goes up above that programmed limit, the pacemaker can't do anything to slow down the sinus node, and so instead it simply has to start skipping every other ventricle beat. When working out, this means that you could be right below the limit and your heart is beating fine, and then a moment later your heart rate increases slightly above the limit and your ventricles suddenly start beating at half the rate. Doing cardio for 15 minutes and then having your effective heart rate instantaneously drop from 155bpm to 78bpm does not feel pleasant; I'm pretty sure that's the "sudden feeling of impending doom" symptom that gets rattled off in prescription drug commercials. It happened to me several times while exercising and I had to immediately sit or lay down for several minutes and let my body work it out.
After a few months I was able to convince my cardiologist to crank up my limit to 180bpm, but then a week later my nerves luckily started working enough on their own again that it didn't really matter, since a standard pacemaker can't (and shouldn't) prevent the nerves from working naturally. That lead to another interesting quirk, where now any time my heart rate briefly shoots up above 190bpm or do, I get a call from my dr's office a week later (and my insurance probably billed $500) because the pacemaker logged it as a potential tachycardia event and reported it through its automatic telemetry system. I've had three awkward phone calls now where a nurse asked me if I remembered whether I was exercising last week at 11pm or whatever, and I said something like, "well no, that wouldn't make sense because my wife and I were on vacation... Oh, yeah it's probably just a false positive, let's not worry about it."
My husband is getting a leadless pacemaker. Apparently, they don’t have the ability to control the upper pace limit; they only stop the pulse from getting too low. That will be interesting for him, because his heart rate doesn’t get up to a normal pace when he works out. When they did the treadmill stress test, they could only get him up to 75 bpm after 7 minutes of pretty intense cardio. However, they decided to go with the leadless pacemaker because he does a lot of weightlifting and relies heavily on it for mental health, and they’re worried that he would break the leads on a normal pacemaker doing some of the different types of movements. His heart rate got as low as 21 bpm when wearing a Holter monitor, so I think they’re more worried about that. He already experiences the sudden drop in heart rate when he works out. I’ve watched it plummet from 80s to 40s in a matter of a couple of seconds while he was on a stationary bike. He usually just takes a few minutes of rest for it to normalize and is fine after that.
I got stented almost a year ago. Was diagnosed and in surgery in 24 hours in the hospital in Arlington, VA. They didn’t fool w COVID vax or anything w me while I was in CVICU. Great care.
Yeah, I was in the ICU for almost a week in one of the most far gone left cities possible, during the peak hospital fearmongering of 2020. Pre-vaccine though. They covid tested me in the ER and again a few days later out of hospital policy, but the first test was relevant diagnostic info. The whole ICU floor was covid equipped with loud HEPA filters, but there weren't any covid patients. No one seemed stressed out about covid. The ICU nurses were chill and didn't make me wear a mask except for when getting rolled to another floor for scans (and only when non ICU Karens balked about it). A dozen different doctors came in all the time and all insisted I didn't need a mask. Everyone was following normal ICU protocols and wearing masks to protect themselves. They were all just really concerned about keeping my heart beating and making me as comfortable as I could be with my chest, back and arms completely covered with adhesive pads (except for the weekend nurse that seemed to do the absolute minimum, and would stab me 3 or 4 times to find a vein and plug in equipment backwards). Overall B+ would recommend again, but only if you have health insurance. The doctors kept joking that I had the "million dollar workup", but after two surgeries they were literally only half joking...
My experience was very similar, shorter duration. I have gold plated health insurance and was at a “boutique” hospital in Arlington VA - about the most woke City in the Country. I wore a surgical mask for gurney trans but that was it. I think it was 48k for a 36 hr hospital stay.