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.

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.