Novia Scotia firefighter Travis Chalmers credits his Apple Watch with saving his life after he suffered a heart attack, according to a report from GlobalNews. The 44-year-old man says the device likely saved his life and he’ll never go without wearing it.
The fit and active Canadian resident said he felt a warm sensation in his chest after playing a game of street hockey with his son.
“I just thought it was a flu or cold coming on and my seasonal allergies had been kicking in,” said Chalmers. “I thought it was flu-like symptoms and shrugged it off.”
But then his Apple Watch began displaying an atrial fibrillation warning, which means his Apple Watch had detected an irregular or rapid heartbeat that could lead to a heart attack or stroke.
“About a half hour later, I’m laying down with my daughter and my heart rate is still beating out of my chest,” he said.
Chalmers decided to play it safe and he went to the hospital.
“When I said atrial fibrillation and gave them the symptoms, I was rushed right in,” he said. “That’s when they told me I’m probably having a heart attack.”
Doctors found high troponin levels in Chalmer’s blood, indicating heart damage due to a heart attack.
“I stayed in the hospital for a week and got more tests done to confirm and one of my arteries is 100 percent blocked,” Chalmers said. Doctors believe Chalmer’s artery became completely blocked off while playing street hockey, leading to the cardiac event.
“It’s one of those things, you just don’t know what’s going on inside. It can hit anyone at any time. I’m very fortunate the watch gave me a second set of eyes.”
“Patients are coming to us with information from their wearable devices that we now have to deal with,” Ciorsti MacIntyre, a cardiologist at Halifax’s QEII infirmary told GlobalNews. “It’s looking for irregularities in the heart rhythm and while atrial fibrillation can be a common cause of that irregularity, there are certainly other benign causes that could lead to it as well.”
The Apple Watch helps doctors “reconstruct what was going on to allow us to correlate their symptoms with what the heart rhythm might be doing at that particular time,” she said. “We can’t be with people 24/7, [but] the watch can be.”
All Chalmers knows is that he’s appreciative of the life-saving alerts from his Apple Watch. “This was a really bad situation,” Chalmers noted. “If I didn’t come in, there’s a chance I wouldn’t be here.”