Source: How-To Geek
That headline sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? Honestly, it reads like one of those clickbait titles you see on Facebook or maybe YouTube, but this is the true story of how my father died, and how the new Apple Watch might have saved his life.
How It All Started
Just after Christmas in 2013, my father had a stroke.
It ended up being relatively mild, but it put him in the hospital for a week. The thing about a stroke is that it’s often the result of other problems, and one of those problems can be, or be the cause of, heart disease.I’ll leave out the two years that followed that initial event: it involved several visits to the hospital, during which my father grew more and more frustrated. During one of those visits, another condition arose. It was a form of heart disease known as tachycardia. His heart started beating so fast, he passed out and fell. The staff at the hospital performed CPR for 45 minutes to resuscitate him, and they put him in the ICU for a procedure known as Therapeutic Hypothermia. His brain had been without oxygen for long enough that there were questions about brain damage.
Would my father wake up? Would he be a vegetable?
Those were the hardest few days of my life, waiting for him to wake up, not knowing if he would live or die, or what kind of quality of life he’d have after that stay. I remember praying, in the waiting room of the hospital, asking God to give us some more time.
Amazingly, he came out of the hospital in good spirits, but the doctors decided it was time to implant a pacemaker.
So back he went, and he eventually came home with a shiny, new pacemaker. (I assume it was shiny, but I couldn’t see it—just the lump on his chest where they implanted it.)The Day It Happened
Then, a few days before Valentine’s day, my father had a seizure and went back to the hospital. He was only there overnight, and nobody could figure out what the seizure was. However, he came home sick—it looked like a case of the flu. He was desperate to not go back to the hospital, so my mother waited nearly two days before deciding he had to go back to the ER. She was getting her purse and keys when he slumped over at the dinner table.
He passed away that night. His heart had just stopped. On Valentine’s Day.
The thing is, his pulse, his blood pressure, and everything else seemed normal. (Yes, they checked that stuff twice a day.) Everything my parents had the power to test at home seemed perfectly fine. My mother didn’t know that one of the most common symptoms of a heart attack is like a bad case of the flu. My father’s heart was dying for two days, and they didn’t realize it until it was too late.
What If It’s Not a Heart Attack?
I’m going to digress for a moment and talk about something that happened to me about two years ago. I was sick with flu-like symptoms. I was “praying to the porcelain god” and not even able to stand up for more than 30 seconds at a time. And my chest hurt. A lot.
The flu symptoms went away, but the chest pain didn’t. I went to the ER on a Wednesday night, hoping that they would not tell me I had a heart attack. As it turns out, I just had some inflammation in my rib cage, a common condition known as Costochondritis….
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