Intertwixt 3: A Long Strange Health Journey

Welcome back to The Intertwixt, my weekly place for the intersection of my personal and work life, and where dreams and reality mix. Sometimes I’ll talk about AR and VR here, or games. This week I’m going to chat about health. Mine specifically, but maybe yours too.

Apple’s latest tech event came and went this week, among many other things. What caught my eye was a surprise announcement: the Apple Watch is getting hypertension alert notifications. My past self would have been overjoyed. My present one is mixed.

The news was something close to me, literally. It dug up emotions. High blood pressure has been in my life for years…or had been? Recently I’ve cured my blood pressure issues. Cured seems like a weird way to put it, but fingers crossed, it’s true.

When I had high blood pressure - a condition that I discovered over a decade ago one day at my company’s health fair when I got a reading and found it was higher than it should have been - I regularly met with my cardiologist to get a series of medications that eventually worked for me. This cocktail of drugs would change over time. I’d check my blood pressure regularly (or sometimes forget) with a cuff, then promise to lose weight…something I’d sometimes succeed at, and sometimes fail at. Time passed.

The blood pressure issues got worse. Medications kept being shifted. In 2023, I started having a racing heart rate at times. I had regular headaches. Things hit a head when I had 180/120 range blood pressure along with stomach pains, even while on a cocktail of blood pressure meds. My cardiologist told me to go to an ER ASAP. I found out that I had a small dissection of my celiac artery. This terrified me, but I was lucky I didn’t have an aortic dissection, which is what they were really worried about.

This then began a long process of inquiry about why my blood pressure was so high. Friends who are doctors suggested that maybe it was an endocrine tumor. I consulted with an endocrinologist, did a salt loading test, and discovered that I had primary aldosteronism, a particular type of high blood pressure. And a CT scan determined I did seem to have an adrenal tumor.

A secondary test snaked tubes in me to determine where the aldosterone levels in my body were more concentrated in one adrenal gland versus the other. If they were, I could be a candidate for surgery — an adrenalectomy, where one adrenal gland would be removed, likely reducing my blood pressure problems. If the imbalances weren’t localized to one side, surgery wouldn’t be recommended, and I’d have lived on a cocktail of other medications with uncertain outcomes. It was a coin flip. Luckily I qualified for surgery.

And even more luckily, it seems to have removed my blood pressure concerns completely. I’m off all blood pressure meds now, but I still take a statin and I take blood thinners for my still not healed dissected celiac artery — something I’ve been told will be fine as long as I get yearly exams and keep my blood pressure under control. Meanwhile, I’ve been focusing on losing weight and being healthier. Exercise, diet, and also GLP-1 medicine, which is a whole other story. While that’s worked great for me, my health insurance recently removed support for GLP-1 weight loss treatments. I’ve been distressed about it, but I’m self-paying right now till I find a permanent solution. Or, waiting for times in medicine to change.

Health care in the US is a mess, and tech promises to help at times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Which brings me to the Apple Watch. I don’t know how the hypertension notifications, which promise to alert of possible high blood pressure conditions over a 30-day period, will work. The feature’s coming to the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3, but also to the Series 9, 10 and Ultra 2 watches, likely because these have updated optical heart rate sensor tech that can work with the new algorithms.

It’s not a replacement for an actual blood pressure measurement, but like Apple’s possible sleep apnea notifications, or possible atrial fibrillation notifications, it could help make you aware of something you might not have been thinking about — like that blood pressure check I got that one random day at work over a decade ago.

I’ve wanted a wearable blood pressure device for all those years I needed to check with a cuff. The closest thing was an inflatable cuff watch device made by Omron that, while fascinating, was so specialized that it wouldn’t work as an everyday watch for me. Samsung has had a blood pressure feature on its watches, but the function requires cuff calibration to work.

Companies like Valencell, who I met with years ago, told me back then that optical heart rate based blood pressure monitors were getting close, but likely would be finger or ear-based because of richer blood flood at those areas. Wrists, I was told, were hard. Maybe times have changed, but I’m curious how much closer wrist tech can get. Apple’s moves are another step.

But I don’t really need that anymore. My blood pressure now tends to either be normal or low, something I don’t think Apple’s new alerts measure for. I hope my blood pressure stays cured, but do I feel frustrated that better alert tech didn’t exist for me over the past decade? Yeah, I do.

We can’t wait around for watches to save us. Hopefully advances in health and assistive tech keep improving and offering wonderful options, but progress is slow. FDA clearances aren’t always quick. And even when health tech seems to work, how does it interface with doctors and medical treatment that we’re already seeking? The connections aren’t always fluid. I found my medical journeys to be slow, methodical, sometimes very bureaucratic, and full of repeated check-ins and consultations. Thank goodness I’m where I am now, and I’m so grateful for everyone who helped me. A year ago, I was going to tech events and suffering headaches and feeling very unwell. It’s scary how bad things were, and how little I even admitted it to myself.

I hope tech will be a help for me. I always do. I use VR headsets for workouts and dream of glasses that will guide me and show me my health patterns and let me train myself and all sorts of magical things. Sometimes the answers just need to come from wherever you can get them. Tech isn’t always fast enough, either. I’m trying to be more disciplined, and I meditate, and I keep daily goals for steps and alternating exercise. I don’t always succeed, but every bit helps. So far, so good.

I’ll be at Meta Connect next week, where new smart glasses are expected. And more importantly to me, ones with a neural input wristband Meta’s been touting for years. I’ll be reporting extensively there, so stay tuned. In the meanwhile, read these stories:

Amazon is also expected to release new display enabled glasses next year (and issue them to its drivers, too).

And, finally, a blast from the past: Nintendo’s bringing the Virtual Boy back next year, as a Switch accessory. The $100 plastic visor will play 14 old 3D monochrome Virtual Boy games, and there’s also a cardboard option. I asked Shigeru Miyamoto about VR and AR plans for Nintendo earlier this year when I visited Epic Universe, and got answers indicating curiosity and cautiousness. Nintendo keeps dabbling in XR…I expect more on the horizon, someday.

See you next week.