Heather Hendershot was watching TV with her husband one Saturday night when her smartwatch pinged her pulse.
“It vibrated and then it beeped at me and told me that my resting heart rate was too high,” said Hendershot. “So, I checked it myself and it was correct.”
She counted more than 160 beats per minute, more than twice her usual resting rate. Without feeling any symptoms she went to bed, assuming her badly beating heart was just a bug.
“She was just going to wait it out and I kind of told her I’d feel better if we went in and checked it out,” Heather’s husband, Cody Hendershot, said.
The next day they drove to Stormont Vail, where doctors moved her to the ICU.
“That’s when my husband and I kind of looked at each other with big eyes and the doctor told me that it was thyroid storm,” said Heather Hendershot. “He said, ‘Don’t Google it ’cause it’s just going to tell you that you’re going to die.'”
Thyroid storm is the result of untreated hyperthyroidism. A condition where the thyroid gland becomes overactive, causing dangerously high heart rates, blood pressure and body temperature.
A few days more might have been too late.
“I wouldn’t have known unless [the watch] was telling me because I’m not someone who checks their heart rate all the time,” Heather Hendershot said.
Dubbed the “Apple Watch patient,” Heather and Cody Hendershot are thanking tech for more time together.
“It could’ve just been me, you know,” said Cody Hendershot. “I could’ve just been alone with two kids and no wife. Super grateful for technology.”
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