Posts by Carrie Rydin

In my first blog post, I wrote about my experience being diagnosed with endocarditis in 2019. You can read about it here.

What no one talks about, when you have a pacemaker or ICD (implanted cardioverter defibrillator) implanted, at least in my experience, is that living with technology in your body comes with liabilities. When I was diagnosed with endocarditis at 37 years old, I received a crash course on this. In my case, my leads needed to be removed because they were harboring harmful bacteria and removing them would not be easy.

My leads were 16 years old, putting me squarely in the “ancient” category of lead lifespan. This meant that extracting them from my heart came with a risk of tearing heart tissue during removal.

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