It’s very Magic School Bus, a little bit Honey, I Shrunk the Defibrillator - “What if we put the hospital inside the patient?” For me, defibrillation followed, then a number of complex procedures, and then in something close to a permanent solution, I had surgery to implant an ICD.Īn ICD is a premium pacemaker (think of it as a two-in-one bundle) and it stands for “implanted cardiac defibrillator,” the main extra feature being the ability to shock the heart if it ever falls spontaneously into similar kinds of arrhythmias. VT is a kind of arrhythmia where the heart appears superficially to be beating incredibly fast, but is actually not really beating at all: only the ventricle pumps, and if nothing is done, cardiac arrest soon follows. I’d done time at cardiac rehab before, years prior, for a general lack of cardiovascular capacity, but this, my second round, resulted from an emergency episode of ventricular tachycardia. Our crimes were various health catastrophes: heart attacks, bypass surgery, strokes. But I hadn’t planned for this - standing in a cold, clinical exercise room full of seniors where I looked more like a grandson with a driver’s license than a patient myself.

I had moved to the city to do the usual things on offer to 18-year-olds: to attend college without a campus, to live a version of city life that only existed in a TV show I didn’t like, to build a thick divider between an unpleasant childhood and a more engaging future. My disease had been much worse before moving here, and had only been a minor factor since, with the occasional pacemaker replacement or medication change. I had lived independently for five years in New York, and the lifelong serious heart disease I walked around with had stayed manageable all that time. So I found myself, at age 23, gathering three times a week with about a dozen retirees in a medical gym atop a hospital skyscraper to exercise under strict supervision and monitoring. Every boy dreams of it: growing up to be the youngest man by several decades at cardiac exercise rehabilitation.

Fitbit heart rate