How the Apple Watch saved my life

Have you ever almost died? I used to think my health was infallible, but one moment in November 2020 upended my life and made me realize just how important technology is in our daily lives.

Everyone has probably heard stories about how the Apple Watch can save lives, but I never believed I would one day call on Apple’s wearable to save mine. As it turns out, it did so repeatedly, and it played a key part in helping me rebuild my life.

Many Apple Watch features are rightfully lauded for their lifesaving capabilities, and many of them have proven to be a boon for me. Here’s how the Apple Watch has saved my life repeatedly.

A brush with death at the age of 33

To understand the impact of the Apple Watch on my life, you need first to understand my health history. November 27, 2020, is a day that I will never forget. It was 3 a.m., I had just moved back to San Francisco, and I woke up with my heart pounding. Instantly, I thought I was having a heart attack, and as it turned out, I was right. Just days before my birthday, my life had been completely upended by the first major medical condition i had ever experienced.

I had seen this coming for much of the year before. I had lost my father four months earlier, and shortly afterward, the stress started causing heart palpitations. I’d also been expecting it for years, as both sides of my family have a history of most major health conditions. The precursors to all of these conditions existed far long before my own choices exacerbated the issues.

The heart attack kicked off a new journey for me, one where health became a key part of my being. It took four days to undergo an angioplasty — a medical procedure where a balloon-like stent is placed inside a blocked artery — and be discharged, and then began a long journey to rebuilding my health that the Apple Watch played a crucial part in.

The Apple Watch could have helped me much sooner

I’ve used an Apple Watch for years, and a few features kept me in much better shape. In particular, I’ve always found the Activity Rings incredibly useful in maintaining my health. Until the pandemic hit in 2020, it motivated me to swim multiple times per week and always exceed my set goals.

When I lost my father months before the heart attack, I switched from the Apple Watch to an analog watch. My father loved his watches, and this was some form of homage to his passion for Rado-branded watches.

In hindsight, this was a decision I will regret for years to come, as I truly believe that the Apple Watch would have alerted me to my impending heart attack. As soon as I left the hospital, I bought the latest (at the time) Apple Watch Series 6, and it became an integral part of my multiyear health journey rebuild.

How the Apple Watch saved my life repeatedly

If you’ve ever had a brush with death, you’ll know that the most challenging part of recovery is the health anxiety caused by the invisible sense of impending doom. Over the past decade of the life of its wearable, Apple has built a suite of health features designed to help in health emergencies. It’s easy to dismiss these features, but I’m living proof that they are incredibly powerful.

I believe that health will possibly be Apple’s biggest contribution to humanity — a sentiment that CEO Tim Cook agrees with — and while many features helped me recover, a few proved crucial for my health.

The biggest of these is Medical ID. Apple remains the only major technology company to sync your medical records automatically, and on at least two occasions, this helped the paramedics attend to me in an emergency. A quick look at my wrist allowed them to see my health conditions, my emergency contacts, and, crucially, all the medications I was taking. The latter stopped them from giving me emergency medication that would have interacted with my heart medication and possibly stopped my heart.

Part of recovering from a heart attack is undergoing cardiac rehab, and during this period, you are also rebuilding your muscles. For me, this meant rebuilding my entire musculoskeletal system, as shortly after the heart attack, I was unable to stand straight. Fall detection is a much-lauded feature on the Apple Watch, and it proved to be a lifesaver. Twice, I fell, and the Apple Watch immediately contacted emergency services while also notifying my emergency contacts.

Apple Watch is a great companion for chronic health conditions

Beyond its useful features in an emergency, there are many reasons why the Apple Watch is a great companion for those with chronic health conditions like mine. When you live thousands of miles from family, as I did then, the emergency contacts feature makes it easy to notify your friends and family — however far away they live — when the worst does happen.

There is also a suite of health features that I’ve come to rely upon. Heart rate monitoring proved to be particularly useful. It’s been almost four years since my heart attack, but until the Pixel Watch 3 came along earlier this year, I still relied on heart rate monitoring as a guide to how my heart was performing.

This is also particularly useful while asleep, and my cardiologist used the data from the heart rate monitoring while asleep to adjust my medications. One of these is a beta blocker — used to help control and suppress your heart rate — but it can often result in your heart rate dropping too low. For the first three months after my heart attack, this was happening frequently overnight, and the data from the Apple Watch helped my medical team find the right dosage for me.

Other Apple Watch features can be particularly useful, although these could have been more effective for me. Blood oxygen monitoring isn’t the most accurate, but it does help identify when you may have respiratory problems. The ECG app is a great way of running a single-lead ECG, although this presents 1/12th of the data that a medical-grade ECG does, so I quickly replaced it with an at-home six-lead EKG device.

Apple’s big impact on our health

In the years since my heart attack, Apple has expanded the Apple Watch and Apple Health to become a key part of many people’s health. New features have been added that provide a more holistic outlook on your health from a single device on your wrist.

WatchOS 8 added mindfulness, which I’ve found useful in helping combat anxiety. It also added fall detection during workouts and more workouts like Pilates. WatchOS 9 added Custom Workouts, better sleep insights, and AFib tracking, which helps millions of people with undetected atrial fibrillation globally. WatchOS 10 improved mindfulness, workout tracking, and medication reminders, which are particularly useful when you take as many medications daily as I do.

WatchOS 11 was released a few weeks ago and vastly improved the Health suite. Sleep reports are improved and more helpful in spotting underlying health conditions. This ties into sleep apnea detection on the Apple Watch Series 10, which can now help you understand if you may have sleep apnea. It’s particularly prevalent in those with heart disease, and the ability to detect it is one of the reasons I found the Galaxy Watch Ultra so appealing. The Vitals app also provides a quick overview of overnight health metrics and can identify whether these results are typical or something underlying that needs further investigation.

Over the past four years, the Apple Watch has been a boon to my life and health, and it has saved my life several times. Many of the new Apple Health features weren’t present during my recovery from a heart attack, but are designed to expand the lifesaving capabilities of the Apple Watch. I will likely always wear an Apple Watch — at least alongside the Pixel Watch 3 for its loss of pulse detection — mainly because it has saved my life numerous times and will likely continue to do so in the years to come.