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When blood pressure goes bad
Onset of atypical or secondary hypertension, an individual's story of denial, dejection and defeat.
Date: 1/8/2010 9:08:52 PM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 1048 times
Life is an adventure, that's what I say. It's not always one you like but you might as well make the best of it. That is why I am treating my journey through the medical system as an adventure. I'm not going to get mad at the dumb things that happen to me. I'm not going to go placing blame. But I am going to point out what has or is happening so that if you are confronted with the same issues, you will know at least that you are not alone.
Is hypertension an adventure? Normally it probably is not. When it first happened to me, I viewed it more like a trip to the grocery store than a trip down the Amazon. Lots of people go to the grocery store every day and lots of people have hypertension. But a few people end up on Amazon and a few people end up with atypical or secondary hypertension.
Hypertension was more annoying to me than most because I've had low blood pressure all my life. My husband and I used to have little contests--at the grocery store actually--where we would each use the BP machine and see whose blood pressure was lowest. I *always* won, even though he was on blood pressure lowering drugs due to an unrelated condition. I had a dumb kind of pride in that. My blood pressure is better than your blood pressure, nah, nah, nah.
Then one day, I knew that had changed. I hadn't taken my blood pressure in months, maybe because I felt it creeping up on me. When I finally found myself alone with a blood pressure machine in an isolated corner of a drug store, I timidly sat down. "What have you got to say to me?" I asked the machine. "Make it something good." But it didn't. It told me what I thought. My BP was up around 145/85 or thereabouts. I eyed it with a kind of resentment that can only come from being told something you already know. The shortness of breath and the fatigue I'd been feeling meant the days of a BP of 112/70 were over.
Still, no reason to jump to conclusions. I spent the next few months sneaking BP measurements in dark corners of grocery stores and pharmacies whenever I found one and I didn't have anyone with me. The story was always the same, only getting slightly worse. At last the day came when I accepted I would have to acknowledge my problem and go to the doctor.
If you're like most people, you are probably wondering why my doctor didn't say anything to me about this. But I am not like most people so I did't have a doctor and I hadn't been to a doctor in years. And then it was for a broken arm. So first I had to get a doctor.
I lucked out. My doctor was really nice. She looked at my BP reading, then around 160/90 and put me on a low dose of lisinopril. Two weeks later my BP was back down to 110/70, where it stayed for the next three months.
After three months I said, look, I think I'm cured. Let's just take me off this stuff and see what happens. So we did. Six weeks later, my BP was a marginal 135/85 or so. She said, okay, stay off the drugs but watch your BP and come back in if it starts to go back up.
I think you can guess that I did not watch my BP, although my intentions were good. At first I felt fine. But over the next three months I started feeling worse and worse. At the same time, those darned BP machines in the grocery stores and pharmacies seemed to have disappeared. I never found myself with one in a situation where I could use it.
I started to think that things were going bad. I could feel my heart pounding at night when I tried to sleep. I was tired all the time. And I just felt bad in a way that I cannot describe no matter how many doctors ask me what I mean by that.
One day during the week before Thanksgiving, I told my co-worker that I felt sick and I was going home early. I went a long route to make sure I passed a location where I knew there was a BP machine. I closed my eyes as the cuff squeezed my bicep. 160/90. Ugh. I'd have to make a doctor's appointment in the morning. There was now no point pretending this was going away. I bought a home-use BP cuff and shuffled, dejected and miserable, out to the car.
(more to come)
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