Wearing an Apple Watch in bed could be lifesaving.
Kimmy Watkins, 29, wasn’t feeling well one day recently, and decided to go to bed, hoping to wake up feeling better. That, however, is not at all what happened, according to a local news report.
Watkins’ watch began beeping as she slept, waking her up to learn her heart rate had spiked to 178 beats per minute — an escalation that came after bouts of nausea, dizziness, and lightheadedness.
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“I was asleep for about an hour and a half before my watch woke me up with this alarm that said that my heart rate had been too high for too long,” she said. “So, for over 10 minutes, it was too high.”
The next day, doctors diagnosed Watkins with a saddle pulmonary embolism — a rare type of acute pulmonary embolism that can result in sudden hemodynamic collapse and even death. In fact, people who suffer those kinds of pulmonary embolisms have only a 50% chance of survival.
“A saddle pulmonary embolism is the most severe and life-threatening of all,” Dr. Richard Becker, a professor of cardiovascular health, told Local 12, “because it’s a blood clot that saddles both the blood vessel to the right lung and to the left lung.”
It’s not clear whether Watkins is married, though she does live with someone. That person, she said, took her to the ER, where she was treated for the embolism.
“I’m very lucky and, if my sleep hadn’t been disturbed, my partner would have found me asleep on the couch or not really asleep,” she said.
In a similar situation one year ago, a woman from Maine said she was saved by her Apple Watch, which alerted her three times in the night that she was suffering atrial fibrillation. You can read more about that from CBN News.
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