Cycling experiences with a pacemaker/defibrillator
A year ago I had a post-ride cardiac arrest. Luckily friends did CPR until my heart could be restarted with a defibrillator. Long story short, I ended up with an ICD implant in my chest. An ICD is a combination pacemaker/defibrillator. The pacemaker side of it controls my heart electrical signals and the defibrillator side is there to fire in case the pacemaker side loses control and then zaps my heart. The implant is made by Boston Scientific. So...the unit can be programmed to creat min/max heart rates, speed of electrical signals thru my heart and a lot of other things I guess I wouldn’t understand unless I was a cardiologist. However getting tall the settings right so that I can return to my old power and speed is proving to be a challenge. If it is set to be too sensitive I get a massive shock. Other settings seem to affect warmup time, acceleration and average power The unit can be reprogrammed relatively easily in a doctors office using a Bluetooth-like method, but the cardiologist and a Bos-Sci engineer say that cycling is too “smooth” for the unit and it’s accelerometers to function at optimal levels (I.e., it works better for runners). I am wondering if any others in the forum have pacemakers or ICDs and what their experience has been.