Perspectives of a Wandering Geographer

I don’t want to bore my readers with a lot of medical mumbo-jumbo so I’ll keep this simple, and you’ll understand why my heart problems doomed my South American trip from the start. One of the first items of business after returning home was manually downloading the data from my tiny, implanted heart monitor to a phone-like device on my nightstand which then transmits the data to my cardiologist’s office.   The monitor records the rate and nature of my heart beats, and an electro-cardiologist can study the readout to determine what’s happening electrically in my aging “blood pump”.   Normally, the downloads and transmissions automatically happen once a day, but I wanted to be sure my doctor had all the latest data from my trip when I called his office which I did first thing on Monday morning. I have a tiny recorder implanted under the skin next to my heart which records my heartbeats.  I’ve had two of them – their batteries die after 3-5 years and the one in my hand was the first on