The Turtle Come Back

So the IV nurse at the clinic turned me on to P90X and I was able to borrow it from a friend to see what it was all about firsthand.

At first, it made me want to cry because all I could do was watch. I was just lucky to be able to go for walks still.

I loved the pylometrics workout. Except for the fact that it's like an hour and a half long.

Is it even safe to do that intense a workout that long?

Unless you're an Olympic athlete of course.

Even if I was in shape, I don't think I would do pylo for that long. It seems excessive. I would break it up into 20 minute increments myself.

Eventually I did what I could of the yoga dvd. Which was not much. That's another hour and a half work out which seems long, but the yoga class I signed up for is the same length. I can feel my commitment to yoga wavering on time constraints alone.

I need Mommy's Quick Relax Yoga not Yoga to Infinity and Beyond.

But no one does that so spit, meet wind.

Then I stumbled onto the Cardio X workout on the P90X menu, which is a 45 minute hodge-podge of the yoga, kenpo and pylometric work outs. It's easier. It's shorter.

Huh, I thought. Maybe I could do this. You know, someday.

So the hubby and I tried it today. I did about 1/3 of the workout. I like the Yoga because FYI Yoga is effing hard and I feel like I need to work those muscles a bit before the yoga class starts. The rest of it was okay. I think I like my kenpo (aka cardio kickboxing) choreography better. I'm kind of an exercise loner--once I learn the basics, I like to skip the class and create my own routines.

So not a P90x convert. Other than to data mine it for moves I like and want to use on my own.

After the dvd ended, I finished with 10 minutes on the elliptical because I felt guilty about not being able to go full throttle. I actually wanted to do 20, the hubby confined me to 5 and 10 was our compromise. He's right to not want me doing too much, I should want to go slow too, but it's so hard to be a turtle when, in the moment, I know I can run.

The aftermath of exercising is never foreshadowed in my body. This makes it really hard to know what constitutes over-doing it and is a major source of frustration for me.

As for my BP, I don't know. I don't care. I am taking a break from bothering with it. I medicate it. I eat right. I exercise. It's going to do what it's going to do. Frankly, it can kiss my fat ass.

High Exhaustion

BP still was not behaving so I took another dose of the prescription medicine yesterday. It did nothing, but today I seem to be trending lower.

I may be also a bit 'adrenal'. We went swimming last night and I got ambitious. I'm better right? I've been walking, up hills even. I should be able to do stuff now, right? So every 'adult swim' break, I ran my ass off in the pool. Today I'm sore and heavy-limbed and forgetting to eat.

I just ate and am hoping it will improve my sense of fatigue---not eating is half the battle sometimes.

Bitter Moment

The BP is high again. I'm waiting to see if prescription stuff is going to kick in or not. If it doesn't, I guess I call the primary care doc and see what they want to do. Because while, yes, there's an herb for that, there's only one, apparently.

Actually, in researching herbs and natural shiznit, there are not many promising remedies for high blood pressure. So I'm in the process of exceeding natural medicine's capabilities as well as those of mainstream medicine.

I've lost 40lbs, I've cut out salt, sugar, flour, processed foods and yet I need twice the blood pressure medication. And now that may not even be enough.

Are there specialists in blood pressure? I would love to talk to someone who could just explain this craziness to me.

You know, I am not all that overweight. I'm fat, don't get me wrong, but I'm not big enough for Biggest Loser either. Nor am I a manager at McDonald's like a person I know. They gorge and gorge on that junk food and are easily 150 lbs overweight and it doesn't touch them.

I'm over here making smoothies. Out of fucking spinach. Eating walnuts when I actually don't like them very much and eschewing chemicals and all the other fun stuff.

And I can't lose weight. I can't get ahead in my health. Meanwhile, I'm surrounded by people bigger than me with crappier diets who are just fucking fine.

Although, to be fair, the GERD is going to be a success story at this rate. It does really well with digestive enzymes, ginger for breakthrough and avoidance of trigger foods. I went from Nexium twice a day to maybe twice a week. If that.

However, GERD was the thing that bothered me the least. As in who cares if I don't have heart burn if my heart explodes from high blood pressure or I give myself a concussion from low blood pressure? See also, I still have adrenal issues.

Hello, body? This is your brain speaking. Get it the fuck together.

Shit, my parents at 60 are healthier than I am. The boomers are going to outlive me at this rate.

I Am Going to Explode

I exercised yesterday and today I am dragging. Not sure if it's the exercise or the fact the BP is going nuts.

146/124. HR 97.

That was last night with blood pressure medication. All I did was stand up.

Jeez.

If I'm sitting down, it's fine. So far. I've had both high and low readings while sitting in the past.

If I'm up, it spikes and sometimes bottoms out.

No bottoming out yesterday.

Just up and up and up.

So I sat and sat and sat (aside from exercising which was the last time the BP was okay).

The workout was fun at least.

I hope I can do it again.

My blood pressure confuses me.

Wildly Swinging Experiments

The blood pressure has been symptomatic of late. Yesterday, I got that gaspy can't breath feeling and felt the need to hold onto something (no 'look ma no hands' for me on this roller coaster, I'm all about hanging on for dear life and praying I don't puke and/or pass out).

Since we reproduced this sensation during the Tilt Table Test I figured my blood pressure had either crashed or was coming out of a crash and morphing into super high blood pressure.

So I started monitoring the blood pressure.

This first block is me sitting and not feeling so hot followed me wondering why I feel so weird with pretty decent blood pressure. Maybe dropping from a high?

• 116/81 1:51 80
• 122/85 1:55 78
• 121/80 2:03 85
• 119/77 2:13 80
• 113/77 2:20 77
• 115/80 2:29 80

Now, I'm standing and taking BP at random intervals as I move about the house. Just because I'm curious. Check out the readings in bold.

• 126/77 2:33 79
• 76/53 2:36 92 This one is so bizarre, I kind of want to dismiss it as maybe an error. I would think I would've passed out with that kind of drop, but I was barely symptomatic.

• 140/94 2:37 85
• 130/98 2:41 85
• 144/97 2:46 87
• 135/54 2:49 89 I felt this one more than the first one. I imagine as the diastolic drop was 97 to 54 instead of 77 to 53. Much bigger drop.
  
• 130/86 3:30 78
• 130/88 3:35 77

This pretty closely mimicked the trend seen during the Tilt Table Test, however, my heart rate was much higher during the test.

So any way, I walked through the house with the BP monitor strapped on my arm like a good little hypochondriac and wondering what the hell I should do about all this.

I ate a pickle since salt seems to help. Except I was not consistently super low. In fact, I was trending high.

But I thought a whole 10 mg of Liosinopril might be too much and maybe not so safe considering how low the lows were. After hemming and hawing and reading large swaths of medical textbooks on Google Books--which didn't help at all other than I now know people of Asian descent lower their blood pressure more than any other ethnicity through simple weight loss. Just FYI.--I cut a Liosinopril in half, figuring I could always drink pickle juice if I bottomed out, right?

Also, I had another adult home so if I did tank badly, I was not unsupervised.

My hope was that the Liosinopril will help everything even out. It may have done that in the past (or I just had a 2 week run of perfect blood pressure, who knows?).

I keep trying to find information on blood pressure and it's just not there. I think I've figured out that hypertension should not cycle so wildly, but I'm not absolutely sure. The reading I've found says hypertension can go from normal to high and by omission it must not cycle from hyper to hypotension. I am still looking for a decent explanation of labile hypertension. I've been reading about dysautonomia stuff and pheochromocytoma (did I spell it right?).

Right now I really hope there will be some interest in ruling out pheo-whatsit and I am wondering about dysautonomia. I wish I knew the highs and lows of my heart rate and the times during the Tilt Table Test, but I was only paying attention to the BP readings.

All I know is the experiments will continue until things improve.

Asthma ER Tales Part III: What We All Missed & In Which I Overdose on Pickles

Part I is here and Part II is here.

Last year, my blood pressure went high. I thought it was doctor induced anxiety because I had won the asshole doctor lottery and was dealing with a real piece of work in a new-to-me HMO system. An allergist who declared I did not have asthma and wanted to discontinue all my meds tout de suite.

In fact, it was the same allergist that had replaced my first pulmonologist and sent me running for 7 years. In the time since I had last seen her, she had progressed from being a bit nutty to full bore passive aggressive sociopath. (I later learned she'd gotten a divorce and it seemed to have sent her over the edge. Not that that's an excuse.) Whereas, she had been professional before, now she was just psycho, raging on a power trip.

And I was fresh meat. She went out of her way to dominate and disempower me. It was pathological. I half expected her to hump my leg and pee on my shoes. It was bizarre, especially coming from a woman. Male doctors (and men just in general) are more likely to be leg humpers in my experience.

I had to file complaints. I had to involve my employer's benefits department. I spent 6 months arguing with this asshole and the HMO network (of which my current pulmonologist was not a part). It was incredibly stressful. I ended up cobbling together my own asthma regimen from left over medications. Skipping doses. Splitting doses. Winging it on a prayer. Looking at overseas pharmacies. Trying to decide if I should just pay out of pocket to go back to my regular doc. Wondering where the money for that would come from and fuming about the thousands and thousands we paid for a completely useless HMO plan.

By the time the HMO agreed that a) they had botched the methacholine challenge that supported the asshole allergist's tenuous (at best) position that I did not have asthma (she had all my medical records showing otherwise) and offered to redo it and b) assigned me to another doctor, I was unwilling to subject myself to their version of medical care. I was beyond disgusted and could not face that HMO without frothing at the mouth. It was August, I had 3 months to go until we switched our insurance and I could go back to my regular pulmonologist.

So I waited it out and figured/hoped that perhaps the blood pressure was high because the asshole factor was high too.

Not so.

I had hypertension and I had to face it this year now that my insurance had changed allowing me to escape the asshole allergist. So I started two blood pressure medications about 8 weeks ago.

My gut feeling was the hypertension was hormonal in origin. Nobody agreed with me. (That is pretty common). However, I did get an endocrinologist to order to some testing (unfortunately, he was an ass and I refuse to go back to him so I didn't do the test and now I've been on prednisone for a month and can't do the test anyway).

So when this latest asthma episode started, what I didn't realize was my blood pressure tanked once I started taking prednisone. It dropped like a boulder in free fall. I had ordered a home bp unit, but it hadn't arrived yet so I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was dizzy and almost passing out from the asthma. I thought I had chest pain from the asthma.

I didn't. It was low blood pressure.

The ER didn't see this because I was so stressed, my BP was moderately elevated when they saw me. The albuterol helped mask it as well.

What clued me in was staying up all night sucking nebulizer in the hospital and just staring at the monitors (I didn't have the attention span to watch television). When I saw my diastolic go down to 65 and stay there, my gut clenched.

"Uh-oh. Too low," I thought to myself.

When I got out of the hospital,I called my primary care doc. I knew that 116/65 was not hugely low but I also knew it was low for me. It wasn't urgent so the doctor's office didn't get back to me until Saturday.

Friday my BP monitor came and I started checking my blood pressure. I had intense chest pain that was much worse with the nebulizer. To the point where I was delaying the nebulizer as long as I could. I was pretty sure I wasn't having a heart attack as I'd had the full heart work up at the hospital, but I couldn't figure out what was going.

Thank God for that BP unit.

What were my BP numbers?

90/50.

87/57.

Too low.

I started eating olives by the handful. Pickles. Drinking olive and pickle brine--just trying to get salt in my system to get my BP up. I got up to 100/60 but still felt really woozy. I googled my BP meds and the damage low blood pressure could do. I panicked a bit as I realized I would have to go back to the ER if things didn't turn around. To cope, I drank more brine. A lot more brine. Buckets of brine. I'm pretty sure I pickled myself that night.

The doc covering for my doc called me on Saturday. I shared my BP readings with them. They told me to reduce my BP meds, that eating salt had been the right move, but if my BP stayed that low to go the ER asap.

To which, after I hung up, I thought, "Fuck that." The last thing I needed was to go back to the ER. I needed rest not ER trauma-drama. Besides, I had heartburn from all the brine. I couldn't stomach any more. I discontinued all the BP meds and decided I would rather be high than low for a while. I had an appointment with my PCP on Monday--just a day and a half away, the risk was acceptable to me.

Miraculously, I turned the corner at this point. I suddenly had energy. I no longer felt like I was going to pass out all the time. The chest pain stopped. I was now just dealing with asthma alone and nothing else, which was soooooooo much easier.

And I did not have to go back to the ER, which was the best news of all. Go pickles!

Postscript 1: So when I switched insurance to get away from the asshole allergist and got back in with my beloved pulmonologist, I told her about the whole experience. The asshole allergist and my pulmonologist had been co-workers. She told me that they also experienced the asshole allergist as passive aggressive. Just so you know I'm not totally off base.

I would say this asshole doctor has been independently verified by a third party. And if I ever see that bitch again... well she's lucky I can't run and breathe at the same time so she'll probably get away just fine. You have no idea what she put me through. She is the only doctor I've ever run across, ever, that I would be willing to sue, that I wouldn't let touch me for fear she would kill me. And that's saying something because I've had some pretty strange doctors. I will have to tell you about the proselytizing Jesus freak doctor next just to prove the point.

Postscript 2: I checked my blood pressure while writing this post. First high spike I've seen in 2 weeks. Last year was absolute hell.