An Apple Watch owner who lives in Cleveland would be thankful the day he bought the smartwatch, as the device kept sending him alerts for something that later turned out to be blood wounds. Doctors say few people have a chance of survival assuming they don’t get medical attention first.
A previous audit was not taken lightly; Apple Watch owner only received medication for bronchitis
Ken Counihan says he prefers to keep track of what he’s doing, which was the reason he bought the Apple Watch in the first place. One day, the wearable kept sending him alerts saying his breathing was elevated. When he and his wife visited the doctor, they only took an X-ray and prescribed medicines.
“I received a warning in October that my breathing was elevated. So basically you have a certain number of breaths per minute, actually I said I went from 14 to 17 or 18. My wife had me call my son and he suggested I go to the outpatient clinic, have it looked at, which is what I did. And they just did an x-ray. And they gave me some medicine for bronchitis at the time.
Later in the evening, Counihan’s blood oxygen levels began to drop, so naturally his wife and son rushed to the hospital, where further diagnoses showed that the owner of the Apple Watch had blood clots all over his lungs. Dr. Lucy Franjic, an emergency medicine physician at the Cleveland Clinic, says blood clots are a serious condition and Counihan’s life would be on the line if he hadn’t sought medical attention sooner.
“My blood oxygen — normally in the mid-90s, which is supposed to be, about 95 and up — started to come out in the mid-80s. It was 10 o’clock in the evening. My wife was very concerned. My son was very concerned. I was like ‘I just want to go to bed. I’m tired… and they both said, ‘No, you have to go to the ER. They took me back to the CT scan and found I had blood clots all over my lungs.”
Franjic says 60 percent of people with blood clots in their lungs may not have woken up the next day, indicating that while Apple Watch didn’t exactly alert him to this condition, the alerts he received were enough to warrant a doctor’s visit. justify, what ultimately saved his life. Counihan certainly credits his wrist-mounted device for preventing an untimely death, and as a precaution, he’s on blood thinners and feeling much better.
It’s likely that any other Apple Watch alert he receives is probably worrying him and forcing him to see a doctor as soon as possible, but on these occasions it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry.
News source: News 5 Cleveland
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