When I first started wearing my heart monitor, I thought I would lose my mind before the month ended. It was supposed to be so easy. The heart nurse assured me that it was easy to put on. The company would call me and walk me through it. I could essentially set it and forget it. She did warn me that the company had a weird name and a 1-800 number so they sounded like spam. We both laughed before I went my own merry way. Oh, and she said it would be a week or two before they contacted me. Fine. Dandy, even. I’d deal with it when it happened.
That was nearly two weeks later. I had my weekly nurse explain it to me and waited until my brother was over to set it up. It was fine and dandy until the next day when it kept saying I had poor skin contact. I thought I set the Do Not Disturb mode, but I apparently hadn’t done it properly because it kept buzzing at me every few minutes. The next day, I used a different holder for the battery because I thought maybe I had put on the first one incorrectly. That didn’t help.
I could deal with the beeping during the day (for some reason, I couldn’t completely mute the audio, which I didn’t understand. They were not a hospital or a clinic–they were just gathering the data. So why should I be notified when something went wrong? It’s not as if they could do anything about it. I guess so I could call 9-1-1 or something like that, but still.), but it was driving me batty at night. I put it in a tissue box with just the sensor sticking out, then put the tissue box in a plastic container filled with books in the corner of my room. I have a white noise machine that I turned to high and I wear earplugs while I sleep. None of this helped. It was torture.