Stephen Pollard writes about how high heart rate alerts from his Apple Watch helped diagnose potentially serious drug interaction problems. I’ll explain what happened.
“I live alone, so if I had a heart attack in bed, I could have died.”
Political columnist Stephen Pollard is undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia. The treatment involves taking what he calls a “miracle drug” every night, along with three other medications to manage side effects.
Recently, my cough developed into what I thought was a chest infection, so I went to see my GP and was prescribed antibiotics. That’s when the trouble started.
Pollard is:
That night I started having a bad headache, which I attributed to the shaking from the cough. I hope your night’s sleep pays off.
I couldn’t sleep well at night. The headache went away, but was replaced by extreme nausea. My brain felt like it was floating but I was being swept away, it was like the worst kind of seasickness imaginable, made worse by the shaking as I coughed. When I tried to get up (I’m a man in my 60s and have a hard time peeing at night), I felt 20 times worse. I couldn’t do that.
Pollard is the first to admit that waiting wasn’t the best decision. He also noted that even though he was in bed that night, his Apple Watch alerted him to a rapid increase in heart rate, which he attributed to his restlessness and general discomfort.
Eventually, he consulted another general practitioner at the same medical center he had visited the day before, who immediately discontinued the antibiotics, arguing that given his ongoing leukemia treatment, the antibiotics should not have been prescribed in the first place.
Introducing the Apple Watch.
More urgently, was I suffering from heart palpitations? (…) I remembered the heart rate warning on my watch. Suddenly he looked very worried. Now that I had finished my last dose, it was important to start slowing down. This will help relieve your nausea and help you recover. But if interest rates don’t come down, the damage has already been done. Until then, it had to be monitored and checked at least every hour.
Thankfully, no damage had been done yet. Pollard used her Apple Watch to monitor her heart rate and was able to see that it was slowing down. Looking back, he says, the heart monitor “may have saved my life. At least it kept me out of big trouble, which is my euphemism for a heart attack.”
The GP who identified the drug interaction was even more frank: “You have to be very grateful to the clock. Without it, you might not have been here.”
At the end of his account, Pollard urges readers to “consider wearing a smartwatch or fitness device,” something I can’t fully relate to.
(via mac magazine)
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