[meheleventyone]

If you think someone is having a heart attack please call the emergency services immediately and hope you don't need a defibrillator or to perform CPR.

Edit: To add I had one in May despite being fit, young-ish and with no cardio-vascular problems. It came on whilst swimming and I foolishly carried on through it, got dressed and walked home, lay down for a bit before I got my wife to take me to the emergency room where they did approximately 4 seconds of EKG before stuffing me full of drugs and rushing me to surgery via an ambulance. For an idea of the level of potential for dying the ambulance came with a doctor as well as paramedics.

[enriquto]

This is really scary. How did you know you were having a heart attack?

[meheleventyone]

I didn't. I was ill the previous week and woke up on the Thursday during the night with what I thought was really bad heartburn even though I don't really get it. Eventually fell back asleep and bought some antacids over the weekend. Weekend was pretty eventful, taking kids on walks and doing a lot of that with them on my shoulders.

So on the Monday I went swimming and thought the pain was related to being still a bit sick or heartburn. The reason I went to the hospital was the antacids weren't doing anything and it was pretty painful. I also nearly threw up in the changing rooms at the pool.

By the time I got to the hospital I was actually feeling quite a bit better and feeling a bit sheepish about being there. Then they hooked me up to the EKG and I knew something was very wrong by everyone going into overdrive. I didn't know how wrong until after the surgery (you're awake through the PCI) and the surgeon took me through what was going on. Basically I was minutes away from dying as my left coronary artery was completely blocked. They had to stent the clot to fix things.

The aftermath is that there wasn't a known cause. I have no chronic issues, or clotting issues and my arteries themselves are perfectly healthy. I was lucky and there was no visible damage to the heart. I'm back exercising again and now in my second set of rehab.

[sizzle]

Would an Apple Watch have caught this fluctuations in your heart? Glad you made it through this scary incident.

[meheleventyone]

I think it would have highlighted issues earlier. In hindsight I definitely has flutters that I maybe should have gotten checked out. That said Apple themselves say that the watch won’t detect a heart attack. Presumably the bar for a device that does that reliably is pretty high.