“I felt like I was doing everything right. I was exercising. I was eating right. I didn’t expect this to happen to me,” Raul Martin said

NEED TO KNOW

• Raul Martin, 64, said his smartwatch detected an unusually high heart rate for him, prompting him to seek emergency care
• Doctors discovered he needed coronary artery bypass surgery
• The California man underwent a newer minimally invasive robotic procedure at El Camino Health, and he said his recovery was surprisingly quick

A California man says his smartwatch may have helped save his life after it alerted him that his heart rate was alarmingly high.

Raul Martin of Mountain View said he thought he was in good health, walking three to five miles a day and doing regular resistance training, according to a media release obtained by PEOPLE from El Camino Health, a nonprofit healthcare system in Silicon Valley.

“I felt like I was doing everything right. I was exercising. I was eating right. I didn’t expect this to happen to me,” Martin, 64, said, per El Camino Health.

However, on a seemingly routine day at the gym, Martin said he felt his heart racing — and his smartwatch told him that he had a heart rate of 200.

“I know that that’s obviously not right. And so, there was a security guard going through the building. I grabbed him and he called the EMTs,” Martin said.

He was taken to El Camino Health, where he soon learned he would need open heart surgery — specifically coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), which is used to improve blood flow to the heart when one or more coronary arteries are severely narrowed or blocked.

Martin additionally learned that the El Camino Health Heart and Vascular Institute (HVI) had recently launched a new, minimally invasive robotic bypass procedure that drastically cuts down on patient recovery time, which he said greatly alleviated his anxieties around the surgery.

“The thought of open heart surgery was, frankly, scary, but this minimally invasive is almost like, ‘Hey, I could come out of this in much better shape [than I was before],’ ” he said.

Martin went through with the surgery, and he said he has no regrets.

“I’ve never felt better after surgery than after this surgery. I’d walk for an hour on the [hospital] floor, and it was kind of funny because nobody could believe it,” he continued, adding, “I feel it puts my on a trajectory to be healthy from a cardiovascular point of view probably for the rest of my life.”

Dr. Nels Carroll, the doctor who performed Martin’s surgery, said that the procedure bypasses the traditional breastbone-splitting approach, which is what typically causes the lengthy recovery times following traditional open heart surgery.

“Cardiac surgery continues to evolve, and we are able to accomplish many of the same goals without such big incisions,” said Dr. Carroll, per El Camino Health.

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“Instead of dividing bones, we make several small incisions through which we provide perfect repairs. The patient doesn’t have to deal with the pain and rehabilitation process associated with open surgery,” he added.

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