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It's not dead yet, Jim.
Like a movie monster, I find my hypertension cannot be killed.
Date: 1/24/2010 10:15:44 AM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 1208 times
(This is a continuing saga and I’m not good at writing recaps. Start here at your peril.)
Call me naïve. Call me an optimist (although that is not a term often applied to me). Call me a wishful thinker. Call me what you will, but I really thought my BP spikes were gone for good. I haven’t had one in three weeks where before they’d been spaced no more than three days apart. Fourteen days was surely enough to know I was “cured,” at least as long as I was taking the lisinopril.
During this period of calm, my life has returned to normal. I’m back to working regular hours. Back to exercising. Back to doing the things I always do without a thought of what would happen if I had a BP spike while doing it.
In fact, last night I had decided to step my lisinopril dosage down to 5mg per day. This cough might not be so annoying at a lower dose. I told R of my plan as I went to take my BP for the evening. He grunted a response. I felt fine as I put the cuff on and was genuinely surprised when the reading came back with 123/94. I stared at it as if it were an alien monster. Such a BP did not exist. The 123 wasn’t bad but that 94 was way out of wack.
I put the cuff back on an repeated the reading. 130/89.
What the heck? Where was the 115/75 I’d grown so fond of? You might say I was in denial but I tried a third time. 135/84. Maybe my cuff was broken. Could my BP really be fluctuating like that? I decided to wait awhile and try again. I took my regular dose of 10 mp of lisinopril.
At 10 pm, one half-hour after my initial reading, I didn’t need the BP cuff to tell me something was wrong. It wasn’t as bad as before the lisinopril but I could feel it. 155/103 was the average of two fairly close readings.
I went to bed thinking that if I could only get to sleep the whole thing would be over when I wake in the morning. But I couldn’t sleep, I was too cold even though room temperature was 73 and I was under the covers. I started shaking. I got up and took my BP again at 10:20. 140/96.
Back in bed my symptoms worsened adding waves of weird feelings that including odd beats of my heart and the sudden sense of being calm.
At 11 pm I took my BP again. This time it was 158/100. Eventually I fell asleep.
I woke at 1:30 am, feeling fine but needing to urinate so I took my BP again. It was nice to see 121/84 again. Nice, but not as nice as it had been. I’d grown to trust those numbers. Grown to view them as mine. Now they glared back at me with an attitude, don’t get too familiar, we’ll desert you when you least expect it.
R watched an episode of Dr. Oz on TV this week where he covered the four most common medical reasons that people have so-called panic attacks. One of them was an adrenal tumor. Dr Oz indicated that the tumor could be like a capsule or sack that stored up norepinephrine, releasing it in bursts periodically. Could this mean that my urine sample wouldn’t show elevated hormone levels between spikes? It’s all so confusing.
Still over a week until my next appointment with Dr. S2. I expect my BP will behave itself until then. I hope it will.
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