Content Notes / Trigger Warnings: Chronic illness, seizures, medical monitoring, fall risk, discussions of bodily harm from wearable tech, ableism in fitness culture.
Welcome back to the Cryptid’s Den.
Come in.
You can set things down here.
This is The Crippled Cryptid.
A quiet corner of the internet where disabled lives are allowed to be complicated, unpretty, and deeply loved.
I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid. Accidental cyborg.
I live in a body with opinions.
Retained DRG spinal cord stimulator leads still living inside me like forgotten wiring.
More doctor’s appointments than most people tolerate in an entire lifetime, usually scheduled in the span of three to four months.
And a caffeine co-dependency that may borderline the need for therapy.
I have a service dog named Luna who enforces rest with alarming efficiency.
And now, I have an Apple Watch that has quietly become part of my safety plan.
Not because I wanted it to.
Not because I love being monitored.
But because I need to stay alive.
Luna is part guardian, part shadow, part
“hey, you don’t get to ignore that.”
M&M is my constant. My best friend.
The one who holds the world steady when I can’t.
This space exists for the days when survival is the whole task.
For love that shows up even when everything hurts.
For telling the truth without turning it into a performance.
If you’ve been here before, I’m glad you came back.
If this is your first time, you’re welcome here.
The Lunatic Café is open.
On today’s menu: Apple Watch vs. Fitbit
Or, more honestly: what it means to rely on technology to stay safe.
I promised that after living with the Apple Watch for a while, I’d write something deeper than a first impression. So here we are. A little over a month in, with data, lived experience, and a clearer sense of what this thing actually means in my life.
Short version?
I’m watching eBay auctions. I want one for M&M. I want one for the Yard Yeti. Christmas is starting to look suspiciously wearable.
But this isn’t a gadget post.
This is a survival post.
How We Got Here: Fitbit, Doctors, and a Body That Wouldn’t Cooperate
Before the Apple Watch entered my life earlier this year, M&M and I found a couple of Fitbits at a thrift store back in 2023. Cheap. Accessible. A small victory.
Several of my doctors wanted me monitoring my heart rate at home. They didn’t like the numbers they were seeing in-office, and they thought that if I had access to my own data, they might be able to do their jobs better.
That hope didn’t survive contact with my body.
Fitbit Alta: When “Affordable” Still Costs Too Much
I bought a Fitbit Alta for $5 at Savers, charger included.
At that price, it was a five-star purchase.
Everything that followed was not.
I couldn’t wear it for more than three to five hours without my skin burning. If I slept with it on, I woke up with literal burns. Switching wrists didn’t help. My body was not being dramatic. It was reacting.
You can chalk this up to EDS and extremely thin, fragile skin, or any number of my other chronic illnesses. POTS. Fibromyalgia. PKD. PCOS. Migraines. If you throw a dart, you’ll probably hit something relevant.
Alphabet soup disguised as a medical file is fun like that.
The charger required perfect alignment to work, like a test of devotion I kept failing.
Then there was the paywall.
To unlock all features, you had to pay monthly or yearly. There was a three-month free trial, which I appreciated, but it didn’t matter. I physically could not wear the device long enough to benefit from it.
And finally, the thing that broke me:
I couldn’t turn off the move reminders.
The buzzing.
The nudging.
The quiet scolding that told me I wasn’t moving enough. That I was sitting too long. That I was failing goals I never consented to.
I wasn’t using this as a fitness tool.
I was using it as a health and safety device.
That distinction matters.
Fitbit did not give me a way to turn that off.
Fitbit Versa: Loved, Useful, and Still Limited
M&M has a Fitbit Versa- and she genuinely loves it. She wears it constantly.
We got it through a free group, someone giving it away, and it felt like another small win. It’s more robust than the Alta. Bigger screen. Better sleep tracking. More smartwatch-like.
There are band options available online, though not nearly as many as there are for the Apple Watch. I do plan on getting her another band, because the original one it came with isn’t the best- but overall, it works well for her body most days.
We also love that both the Versa and the Apple Watch are waterproof. That alone matters more than people realize when your life includes pain flares, brain fog, and the occasional need to shower sitting down.
But while we’re talking about water, one feature we both adore on the Apple Watch is the water eject mode. The way it actively pushes water out of the speaker after being in water mode feels thoughtful. Intentional. Like someone actually considered how the device would live with a human being.
M&M’s feedback matters here just as much as mine.
She isn’t just my girlfriend.
She isn’t just my partner.
She’s my support system.
She’s helping me figure out this tech.
She’s helping me understand how it works, how it fails, and how it fits into my body and our life.
That said, even the Versa lacks the things that matter most to me now:
- No built-in fall detection
- No ECG for heart rhythm monitoring
- No automatic emergency calling
It lives entirely in Fitbit’s ecosystem, which doesn’t natively integrate with Apple Health. That means more apps, more steps, more cognitive load.
Better than the Alta? Yes.
Enough for my body? No.
Not to say the whole family is jumping to iPhones just yet- though M&M does seem awfully in love with my iPhone 16.
Enter the Apple Watch Series 7
I didn’t buy the Apple Watch because it was trendy.
I bought it after my six-day wearable heart monitor.
After I fell and had a seizure in the kitchen when M&M wasn’t by my side.
After Luna wasn’t there.
After a “friend” told me it was just anxiety and refused to call for help.
After I didn’t have the tools to help myself.
After I didn’t know how long I’d been on the floor.
I bought it because my body has become unpredictable in ways that are not safe to ignore.
Here’s what changed.
I can turn off the move reminders.
No guilt. No shame. No punishment for resting.
And if I want to see step counts or fitness data, it’s there. For the good days. The days when my body cooperates. And I like getting to see what I can do on the good days, no matter how few and far in-between they are.
There’s also a mode that allows me to tell the watch when I’m using a wheelchair, so it measures movement accurately instead of punishing me for not walking.
It has fall detection.
If I have a seizure and don’t respond, it will call for help.
That sentence alone is why this device lives on my wrist.
It monitors heart rhythm and alerts me to AFib.
It tracks blood oxygen.
It flags changes in walking steadiness.
It tracks sleep without subscriptions.
No locked features.
Battery life sits around 17–18 hours, but the fast charger gets it to full in about 30 minutes. That charging window gives my skin time to breathe. Time to exist without something attached to me.
There are endless band options.
Leather for soft days.
Dragon scale for loud days.
Watch faces that feel like me.
It also integrates seamlessly with BioCore– the same people behind the six-day heart monitor I wore. I can open the BioCore app and see my Apple Watch data, with explanations that tell me what it means.
I’m enrolled in the Apple Health Study and the Apple Women’s Health Study through the Research app, allowing my anonymized data to contribute to medical research.
Inside Apple Health itself, I can customize everything.
Cycle tracking.
ECG.
Caffeine intake.
Water consumption.
Even logging things like acne.
None of it is hard to read.
None of it is hard to use.
It’s accessible.
And that matters more than most specs ever will.
Reluctant Cyborg, Explained
I call myself a reluctant cyborg for a reason.
Part of it is the retained DRG leads- remnants of an implant that was supposed to help, that wasn’t fully removed, and that a doctor lied about.
Part of it is this watch.
I don’t hate it.
But I do need it.
I need it because seizures don’t ask permission.
Because falls don’t wait until someone is nearby.
Because calling for help isn’t always something I can do myself.
This isn’t convenience.
This is redundancy.
This is harm reduction.
And Then There’s Luna
Here’s the part that matters most.
No piece of smart tech will ever replace Luna.
She is my medical alert service dog.
She notices changes before numbers do.
She notices shifts in my body before tech can respond.
She interrupts behaviors.
She grounds me.
She enforces rest with a stubbornness no algorithm can replicate.
The Apple Watch can call for help.
Luna can prevent the emergency in the first place.
Technology is a tool.
Luna is a partner.
The watch backs us up.
She leads.
Why This All Matters
This isn’t about brand loyalty.
It’s not about being an Apple person.
If you read my Apple vs. Samsung post, you already know I was a Galaxy Ghoul long before I ever touched an iPhone. I still love both brands. But Apple is more accessible for my needs and my life right now.
This isn’t about optimization.
It’s not about aesthetics.
It’s about building layers of safety in a body that has proven it cannot be trusted to stay upright or conscious without warning.
It’s about choosing tools that work with disabled lives instead of shaming them for existing.
It’s about survival that doesn’t require pretending we’re fine.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | Apple Watch 7 | Fitbit Alta | Fitbit Versa |
| Fall Detection | Yes | No | Limited/No |
| Emergency SOS | Yes | No | No |
| ECG / AFib Alerts | Yes | No | No |
| Blood Oxygen | Yes | No | Some models |
| Move Reminders | Optional | Mandatory | Limited |
| Subscription Required | No | Yes | Yes |
| Skin Tolerance | Variable | Poor (for me) | Moderate (poor for M&M when sick) |
If today was heavy, you didn’t carry it alone.
If today was quiet, I hope it stayed gentle.
If you’re here, you belong here.
Love you. Now say it back.
-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability, honesty, and a little chaos.
🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
There’s never pressure to donate. Staying counts.
If you’d like to support the long road toward stability and mobility:
💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility
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