Two weeks into it (or IT in me), but I have not yet reached the stage of forgetting about it. Indeed, the thought that it is there is more or less constantly uppermost in my mind, or at most one layer down. And as I forget about the warnings against raising my arm and reach for a high shelf, or brush my hair, or try to dry my back after a shower, there is more than sufficient discomfort to remind me--that it's there, presumably sparking away at a rate of 60 bpm. And look at that little mound of flesh below my collar bone, which seems to move in a circular motion when I use my right arm to perform some repetitive action--cleaning my teeth, for example.
But the reminders that IT is there go beyond that fact; they raise all sorts of worries that percolate through my mind about my heart. Is this going to fix the problem? We started with atrial fibrillation. That was to be fixed by shocking the heart back into regular rhythm. Then the diagnosis changed to heart block category two, and hence the pacemaker. But when I ask whether the atrial fibrillation problem is solved, the answer was, "probably, but we cannot be sure." Or was it--"most probably."? So there is a continuing level of anxiety, which I suppose will only go away with the passage of time and some assurance that nothing else is wrong--that the pacemaker has fixed the problems.
Joan has suggested we need a name for the pacemaker. She draws an unlikely analogy between the pacemaker and our GPS, whose voice that guides us and bugs us ("recalculating ") we have named Agnes. I forget where that came from. We'll have to think about a name for the "device"--as the Manual insists on calling it--but perhaps we should wait until the technician interrogates it. He will probably know its name.
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