WASHINGTON -- Doctors implanted a pager-sized device in the chest of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday to correct episodes of a rapid heartbeat, President Bush said.
"I'm told the operation went well," Bush told reporters in Camp David, Maryland, as he met Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Asked if Cheney had the device implanted, Bush said: "They did put it in."
Later, doctors at George Washington University Hospital in Washington said their surgery to implant the device went well. "Everything went exceedingly well, exactly as planned," said Alan Wasserman, chairman of the department of medicine at the hospital, which Cheney entered at 8 a.m. EDT.
The surgeons said Cheney was in the recovery room having lunch and had taken a phone call from president Bush. He was expected to leave the hospital later on Saturday.
It was the third significant procedure addressing his heart problems since Cheney was elected vice president and came after a monitoring device two weeks ago discovered Cheney was having brief episodes of a rapid heartbeat.
The implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) weighs less than 3 ounces (80 grams) and is implanted under the skin of the upper chest. It functions as a pacemaker, to speed the heart rate, and as a defibrillator, to slow it down. About 150,000 Americans have one.
Cheney, 60, entered the hospital in an apparently upbeat mood.
"Good," he said when asked how he felt as he arrived at the hospital with his wife Lynne. Was he anticipating an easy day? "I am," he replied.
The vice president has had four heart attacks since 1978, the most recent one last November. He had an angioplasty in March to reopen a partially blocked artery. In 1988, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery.
BUSH SAYS PACE SHOULD BE COMFORTABLE
His heart problems have raised questions about his ability to carry out his duties. But Bush said he did not think Cheney should -- or would -- slow down.
"He ought to work at a pace he is comfortable with ... . If I were to say, 'slow down, Mr. Vice President,' he would say, 'forget it,"' Bush said at Camp David.
The surgery came after Cheney was the subject of an "electrophysiology" study during which he was to be sedated. It involved doctors threading wires into his heart from the groin and using them to stimulate the heart with a mild shock to see if they could induce an abnormal heart rhythm.
Cheney, who has been given more influence than most vice presidents, said on Friday that doctors told him there was no reason he could not continue to function normally in the nation's second highest job.
"I have no long-term doubts. The doctors have assured me that there is no reason why either the procedure or the device that is being implanted should in any way inhibit my capacity to function as vice president," he said.
But he said if doctors told him he no longer could properly carry out his duties, "I'd be the first to step down."
Cheney and his aides were optimistic that he would be released from the hospital on Saturday afternoon and resume a normal work schedule on Monday. He plans to leave Washington on Thursday for his home state of Wyoming for a long weekend.
Cheney decided to have the tests after a Holter electrocardiogram monitor that he wore for 34 hours turned up four separate episodes, one to two seconds each, of abnormally fast heartbeats.
His cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, said Cheney felt none of these occurrences. Cheney wore the Holter monitor during a weekend rather than during the workweek when he would be expected to be under more stress.
Experts said the device should help.
"It's like having an emergency room implanted in your chest," said Dr. Douglas Zipes, a cardiologist at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.
Zipes, who invented the cardioverter component of the ICD, said he spoke on Thursday with Cheney's cardiologist, Dr.
Zipes said Cheney's episodes of irregular heart rate were trivial.
"Ordinarily, we can dismiss those as being nothing. However, in someone who's had heart attacks, we know that they may be a red flag of a risk factor for a more serious episode," he said.
Zipes said that based on his conversation with Cheney's doctor, there has been no change or deterioration of Cheney's heart function.
Implanting an ICD could reduce Cheney's risk of sudden death to less than 1 percent, Zipes said. He will be able to return to normal activities quickly, he said.
