The Apple Watch has again been credited with helping to detect a user’s potentially life-threatening heart condition. As first reported by local news outlet WZZM 13, a woman in Michigan says her Apple Watch alerted her to an abnormally high heart rate, sending her to urgent care where an EKG revealed she had had a recent heart attack without realizing it.
Diane Feenstra recapped the situation in an interview with WZZM 13, saying:
At the local urgent care center, doctors performed an EKG, which revealed that Feenstra had recently had a heart attack without realizing it.
The day in question, April 22, I had 169 beats per minute heart rate even though the most vigorous exercise I had done was to walk up 12 steps. So I called my husband at work and said do you think this is concerning? And he said call your doctor.
Feenstra then visited Meijer Heart Center, a clinic located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Here, additional testing uncovered that Feenstra had a full blockage in the widow maker artery, and she had a stent procedure done to rectify the situation.
Unlike men who feel an elephant on their chest many times, a woman’s symptoms are very different. I had pain going down my left hand, I had a little swelling in my left foot, I had indigestion that I just explained away as acid reflux that I was experiencing as I got older. The biggest thing was pain in my shoulder and I figured I had vacuumed and put my muscles out of whack somehow.
Now, Feenstra is touting the Apple Watch as a life saver after having originally received it as a birthday gift:
WebMD has more details on what a widow maker heart attack is, noting that it can be one of the deadliest kinds of heart attacks — particularly when it occurs outside of a hospital.
It’s such an easy thing to see what your heart rate is, had I not done that that morning, who knows, but I may have had another heart attack that would have been fatal.
