The iPhone 12 Can Disable My Defibrillator
Is mobile technology moving to an unsafe place for people like me?
A doctor once disabled my pacemaker while I lay on the metal table of an operating room. I stared at the sci-fi-style lamp above me that hung from its crooked arm while the doctor used a computer to tinker with my device. With a touch of his stylus on the screen, my pacemaker stopped pacing, and my heart rate slowed way down. I felt as though I were falling away like the main character in Get Out, as if my chest were sinking into the table and my face and body were deflating, slipping away from me and disappearing.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Weird was the only word I could articulate.
With a quick flick of the doctor’s wrist, the machine inside me picked up again and paced my heart in a normal rhythm, and I felt okay again. I’m pacemaker dependent, which means my heart has no reliable intrinsic rhythm. It won’t beat quickly and regularly enough to keep me alive without help, but there was no danger in that OR. It was a controlled environment with doctors present, fiddling with my device’s settings for good reason.
Recently, however, doctors at the Henry Ford Hospital discovered that an iPhone 12 can have a similar effect on a pacemaker as that doctor’s stylus…
