They’re meant to be lifesaving, so imagine the terror of learning that the defibrillator implanted inside your body could have a faulty battery that might stop your heart working at any time.
‘It is a bit like hoping you have the winning lottery ticket when you really need that money,’ says Andrew Wilson, a 49-year-old software engineer from Nottingham. ‘If you have a gun pointed at your chest, you know what’s going to happen, but with this you just don’t know if you have a faulty device or not.’
In March this year, Andrew was given a defibrillator, a high-tech device designed to detect instantly if the heart’s pumping mechanism has gone awry and, if it has, to deliver a bolt of electricity to shock it back into rhythm.
Andrew needed the implant after a bad attack of flu caused damage to his heart muscle. But getting the device was the beginning rather than the end of his problems.