I Am Running on Battery Power

Good morning readers. Saturday is my favorite day of the week, even in retirement, when everyday feels like Saturday. I was remembering how I spent a Saturday, six years ago on January 26,  2013.  On that morning I was waking in a hospital bed at Manchester Catholic Medical in Manchester, NH. It was my full day with my new pacemaker.

I felt a lot better when I was getting about 60 heartbeats per minute than with than a paltry  35 thanks to my implanted  Medtronic C2RR01.  Advances have been made since Earl Bakken created a battery-powered transistorized pacemaker based on an electronic circuit for a metronome. However I do run on battery power and eventually I will need to have the device swapped out. In the 1960s and 1970s, a few pacemaker companies made nuclear-powered pacemakers powered by plutonium-238.  Imagine how strange my life would be with one of these.