How An Apple Watch Saved A Man From Dying On The Couch
Thanks to Apple Watch's heart and blood oxygen monitoring features, a man's life was saved from bleeding out internally, a condition he didn't even know he was suffering from.
A man would have died on the couch from a complication he didn’t know he had if it hadn’t been for his Apple Watch. Consumer technologies continue to advance at a rapid pace. Some of the more impactful applications that have come from these advancements include location services, instant personal communication, emergency calls, and health monitoring.
Since these applications became standard with retail models, there have been numerous accounts where these now-standard functionalities were the reason that someone’s life was saved, as was the case for one lucky Apple watch owner.
On Thursday, Reddit user digitalmofo made a post on the r/AppleWatch subreddit titled “Well, my Apple Watch 7 just saved my life.” The post contained a brief account of this user’s near-death experience, which is quite captivating. According to Apple Insider, ”One lucky wearer was helped from a potentially fatal situation by an alert from his Apple Watch”
A week prior to the incident, the user had set their phone and Apple Watch to Do Not Disturb for work. On this fateful day, the user was feeling fatigued as lunchtime approached, and they decided to grab a quick nap on their couch. When they awoke from their slumber, they saw at least ten notifications on their Apple Watch stating that their pulse was racing.
Since this was not a common occurrence for this user, they decided to call out of work for the rest of the day and try to reduce the symptoms. Unfortunately, they were not able to calm it down, they then contacted their doctor and had a video call to discuss the situation with them. The doctor went over the data collected by the Apple watch as far as the frequency, oxygen levels, and pulse rates and felt that this warranted an emergency 911 call to get him to a hospital right away.
Upon arrival at the hospital, initially, the medical staff thought it was a possible heart attack they were suffering from, but they identified the actual problem, and it was severe internal bleeding. The author of the post had a little over 3g/dl hemoglobin which is 20% of the amount that a person normally has in their bloodstream. In a follow-up post, he goes into the specifics that they had lost five pints of blood and the doctors said that had he not gotten to the emergency room and received a transfusion when he did there would be no chance that he would have survived.
An endoscopy revealed that he was suffering from esophagitis, gastritis, duodenitis, and a hiatal hernia. He goes on to thank all the doctors and nurses for the great care he received and how accommodating the hospital was. They conclude their post by stating, “I’d have just passed out and died without ever knowing if not for my Apple Watch.” This is not the first time we have heard of this new technology coming to the rescue and saving someone’s life.
In January, the ECG app helped an expecting mother and her unborn baby because of a high heart rate alert, and because she acted on the alert immediately, both she and her child were able to be saved. In England, a man was bombarded by resting heart rate alerts, and they were being triggered by the fact that his heart had stopped beating 138 times in a two-day period. Life is always unpredictable, and because of technologies like the Apple Watch, it may be one day that your life is saved because of these products.
