Woman’s Oura ring helped warn her she might have cancer

Wearable health devices, such as an Oura ring, can provide helpful insights into day-to-day health. For 30-year-old musician Casey Cattie — hers helped her figure out that she had Stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma before even doctors were able to.

The advanced technology of an Oura ring not only tells about a bad night’s sleep, one’s stress levels or where a woman is in her menstrual cycle — it also detects signs of illness, which is what gave Cattie that gut feeling that something was off.

Cattie told TODAY.com in an interview that she would often wake up drenched in sweat — despite sleeping under a fan.

Her ring — through its app — told her she was showing “major signs of illness,” something that the millennial couldn’t ignore. So she made appointments with several doctors — yet nothing seemed alarming to them.

“I was seeing all these fevers but nothing else,” she told the outlet. “I had all these vague symptoms. And I had seen my primary care provider, I had seen a GI doctor, I got a colonoscopy and endoscopy to check for any type of internal bleeding — all of that was negative.”

“My doctors ran all of the tests,” Cattie explained. “My bloodwork was totally normal except I was iron-deficient.

She even visited a hematologist oncologist who didn’t seem concerned with what came back on the tests they ran on Cattie.

However, the longer Cattie went undiagnosed, the worse her night sweats and other symptoms got.

It wasn’t until she was on a trip to Iceland to celebrate her 30th birthday that things took a turn for the worse.

Cattie suddenly had trouble breathing, even after walking short distances.

“I couldn’t even make it to the restaurant next door without stopping to catch my breath three or four times,” she said in the interview.

After finally deciding to visit the emergency room before heading back to the US, Cattie received some shocking news. She had over a gallon of fluid in her lungs, for which the doctors had her undergo CT scans because “they thought it was cancer” due to her enlarged lymph nodes.

After the 30-year-old was back in the US, she had a PET scan and after doctors did a biopsy on her lymph node — it turned out that she was dealing with Stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma all along.

Cattie was ordered to undergo 12 rounds of chemotherapy, and as of this month, she is more than halfway done with those required treatments, according to TODAY.com.

Despite all she’s been through, Cattie has a positive outlook on it all.

“I’m so incredibly lucky to know that there will be another side of this diagnosis for me. I’ll get a second lease on life, but I’ll never be the same. even knowing the next 4 months of chemo will be grueling, the world feels more colorful now. life feels lighter. the sun is brighter,” she wrote in a recent Facebook post.

Unfortunately, Cattie isn’t alone in having her Oura ring detect something seriously wrong with her health.

A Virginia-based family aesthetics nurse practitioner, Nikki Gooding, has a very similar story to Cattie.

She, too, was experiencing night sweats in which her Oura ring detected that something wasn’t right with her health.

It turns out she also had a mass on her, which was a “textbook presentation of lymphoma.”

“If I didn’t have the Oura ring, I’m sure I would have figured it out eventually. But having this information laid out in front of me definitely made me take it more seriously,” she said in a social media video.