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Best of times/ Worst of times
I experience a new and more horrible type of blood pressure fluctuation.
Date: 2/14/2010 11:09:13 AM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 64459 times (This is a continuing saga and I'm not good at summarizing. Start here at your peril.)
This was a bad week for me. Or a good week. Depends on how you look at it.
I had an event on Wednesday night, Feb. 10th. That was good in a way because it allowed me to get the 24 hour urine sample with an episode in it. Now there’s some hope that will show something that the doctor can use to diagnose me. On the other hand, the event started at around 8 pm so the urine collection didn’t finish until 8 pm Thursday night. Okay. But then I had my blood didn’t get drawn until over 36 hours after the onset of the episode. I don’t know if that is good or bad.
The thing that from my perspective is clearly bad is that I had a second event on Friday night. Those two were closer together than since before I started on the Diovan two months ago. I hope that isn’t a trend.
Another bad thing is that both of these events were different from what I’d had previously. They weren’t single sharp spikes that lasts about three hours. Instead what seemed to happen is that I pretty much lost control of my blood pressure altogether.
When I sat down to take my BP on Wed. night, I already knew I was in an event. I’d been feeling bad for a while but I had some stuff to do. I sat down, took my evening 5 mg of lisinopril and took my BP. It was high. Lately, I’ve been verifying high readings with a second reading because they’ve seemed kind-of spurious. Plus, I’ve been in a bit of denial. So I took a second reading and, sure enough, it was significantly lower. Now I needed a 3rd in order to non-arbitrarily choose between the two values. But the third reading was even lower. So I took another. Again, lower than any of the previous ones. I waited a bit, sat up straight and took a fifth. It was back to a high BP.
I didn’t feel good about this. Every time I took my BP, the reading was significantly different from the previous value. Sometimes the systolic was high. Sometimes the diastolic was high. Sometimes they were both low. Sometimes one was high and the other low.
It occurred to me that the machine might be broken. Or at least that my doctor might think the machine was broken. Due to the way I felt, which was worse than previous events, I figured the values were true. I got my husband, R, to take his BP several times. The cuff was reproducible for him. Back on my arm it reverted to a random number generator.
When I tried to sleep, I kept experiencing waves of cold. It felt like a pincushion on my skin. Or goose bumps. And I was too cold and shivering to sleep. Cold has always been one of my symptoms but this was more intense. And I didn’t have any of the waves of calm that gave me something of a reprieve during previous episodes. The event lasted at least four hours, which is longer than any previous event I’d recorded.
Last night was the same thing except that I didn’t do so many measurements. It started around 9 pm and by 10 pm I decided to just go to bed and wait it out. Maybe three hours in it occurred to me that the shivers I experienced were reminiscent of fever chills. I got a thermometer and took my temperature. It was 99 degrees. Not much of a fever but significantly higher than my typical temperature of around 97.4.
Fevers are usually worse at night and I usually have my events at night. I wonder if that means anything. Could I have some bizarre infection?
Another thought that’s occurred to me is brain tumor. Could I have a brain tumor? Clearly if these types of symptoms could be psychosomatic, that means that the brain could cause them and that means a tumor could cause them.
I’m almost scared to ask my doctor about those possibilities. Not because I’m afraid to have them, at this point any definitive diagnosis would be a relief, but because I might sound like a hypochondriac and therefore be dismissed as psychosomatic.
If the urine or blood tests show any anomalies, I won’t need to bring up any crazy theories. And maybe I’ll be on my way to a cure. I’d keep my fingers crossed if I were superstitious.
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