According to her own statements, her “Apple Watch” saved the life of the American Kim Durkee. The 67-year-old, from Maine, had no indication that she had any health problems when her watch suddenly went off in late May.
Durkee woke up at night because the watch was vibrating. The warning: You have an irregular heart rhythm that indicates atrial fibrillation. At first she thought the warnings must be a coincidence. She felt neither a racing heart nor did she suffer from difficult breathing. “I didn’t have a single clue that anything was wrong in my body, not one,” she told Today, which reports on the case.
But it didn’t stop. For the three consecutive nights she was woken up by the same alarm over and over again. On the third night alone five times between midnight and 4am. She then decided to have a doctor examine her.
In the emergency room at the local hospital, she explained to the doctor on duty that her smartwatch had warned her. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Really, your watch told you you had atrial fibrillation?’ Everyone in the hospital was amazed. I was the talk of the clinic,” she recalled.
Then he did some tests and finally said: “Your watch is right, you have atrial fibrillation.”
But it did not stop. Inconsistent values were detected in several tests, so an echocardiogram was carried out. Images of the heart are created using an ultrasound device.
The result: Durkee had a heart tumor. The diagnosis was: atrial myxoma. It is the most common primary tumor of the heart. The benign tumor usually occurs in the left atrium. The myxoma was also discovered in Durkee’s left atrium.
As a rule, myxomas do not cause any symptoms for a long time, the NDR explains in an analysis. Symptoms such as cardiac arrhythmia, breathing difficulties, fainting spells, fever and weight loss only appear when the tumor impedes blood flow. It becomes dangerous when blood clots (thrombi) detach from the myxoma and get into the brain, lungs or arteries in the legs or arms. There they can trigger strokes, pulmonary embolisms or arterial vascular occlusions. NDR warns that sudden cardiac death could also occur.
Durkee said the tumor disrupted her heart’s rhythm and caused an arrhythmia. She had to have surgery in a Boston hospital. The tumor was removed.
When Durkee asked her surgeon what would have happened if she hadn’t been checked out, he said, “You probably would have had a massive stroke and died,” she recalled.
The five-hour open heart surgery took place on June 27th. A month later, Durkee is already recovering well. She wears her smartwatch 24/7. “I believe 100 percent that she saved my life,” she says. “I never take them off.”
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