Coffee heat rising

Health care

Siri, RESET!

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! A junket to the Mayo Clinic, halfway to Payson from my house, has reset the computer where the blood pressure neurosis is concerned.

In fact I went in to discuss a different issue, which by the time today’s appointment rolled around had resolved itself. However, I decided to traipse out there anyway, because there were other things to chat about. Because I’d made the appointment on short notice, it was with a physician’s assistant and a nurse-practitioner (yahoo! two of ’em) rather than my regular doctor, who having just returned from maternity leave is maxed.

Number one headache (and today that was a literal term) had to do with the blood pressure conundrum. Took the pills out there and explained why I do not want to take the damn things, but also fessed up that yesterday I enjoyed yet another spike in numbers, into the 140s. In fact, the NP got a first reading of 159 over somegawdawful thing, though that came down considerably.

I hate doctor’s offices and I hate medical facilities and I hate having to explain myself to doctors and I’m not there unless stress and pain push me there, so of course whenever I get into one of those places, my blood pressure hovers near the ceiling.

Fortunately, a pair of the Chinese academics sent a new paper to edit yesterday, so I took the laptop with me so I could read copy while cooling my heels in the waiting room. That meant…lo! I also had my whole neurotic log of daily blood pressure readings, complete with weekly averages, an overall average, and a percentage breakdown of figures by high, medium, and low ranges.

I expected this elaborate spreadsheet would just confirm that I’m crazy, so hesitated to show it to her. But to the contrary: she was delighted to get the data. A-n-n-d…she was not at all fazed by the occasional spikes into the 140s. She said it’s the average that matters, and that under 130 is not very threatening, although one would like to keep it as low as possible to protect the kidneys and heart from potential damage.

I pointed out that the American Heart Association (which is partially funded by Big Pharma…) insists that ONE reading in the 140s or above is enough to put you on pills. (The British Health Service, in contrast, states that a consistent pattern of 140+ readings over time is the criterion.) I also pointed out that AHA guidelines recently changed; what used to be designated “moderately elevated” (readings in the 130s) is now considered to be “prehypertension” that must be treated, that readings in the 120s are now the “moderately elevated” range, and that the desired range is now in the 110s. She shrugged that off: clearly not impressed.

She said with an overall average of 128.4/83.3, she probably would not prescribe medication at all. However, she did agree that some of the startling spikes were a concern. And she also agreed that the drug Cardiodoc prescribed (or any of them, for that matter) had the potential to cause some serious dizziness since my BP is often in the low 120s…and even, of late, in the teens. On the other hand, she thought there was a good chance the very small dose would have no side effects at all. She suggested that I simply try the drug on a day that I don’t have to drive anywhere and see what happens. In fact, she proposed that I try it during a time when the numbers are spiking.

I said I’d been told it takes two weeks to take effect. Not so, said she: it’s a 24-hour pill, and if it’s gonna work, it will work within that period. She said it isn’t necessary to get “on” it for any length of time to see what it will do. And if we don’t like the results, the obvious response is simply to…well…stop taking it.

Wow!

So relieved was I that I decided to stop in my favorite mega-supermarket, which is on the way home from the Mayo, buy a bottle of Cabernet, and take a flying leap off the back end of the wagon. Then, go to bed and sleep away the remaining half the afternoon.

Last night was pretty terrible: after coming home around 10:30 from a choir shindig in a restaurant (nothing like a club soda instead of a glass of wine to make you the life of the party…), the evening BP readings were in the stratosphere. Then — perhaps consequently — I slept badly, woke up at 5 with a hot flash, and found readings that were still elevated by the light of dawn.

Well, the Mayo Lady pointed out that scarfing down a basket of salty French fries after having had nothing to eat since about 2 in the afternoon would tend to jack up one’s blood pressure numbers. I thought that was a long-term effect, not a one-off sort of thing, but apparently restaurant food will do the job on your BP readings right now. Yes, I do know better than to eat that kind of junk, but by 9:30 last night I was too hungry to care.

So I fly in the house, grill a lamb chop and some asparagus and serve those up with some leftover polenta and a tomato and a couple glasses of cheap red wine. Yes!!

Then I stagger into the back of the house, fall into the bed, and sleep for a good two hours. Phone rings; chat with friend; fall back to sleep.

Roll out of the sack along about 5:30. Feed the dogs, pick up the kitchen. Break out the Omron. And this is what happened:

Holy mackerel! And think o’ that: 108/74? 110/72?!!?

Clearly what is missing from my life is red wine…

Seriously: at 10:30 last night the average of six figures was 144/85.8. Less than 24 hours later, all but one of a similar set of figures is under 120.

You can guess what would happen if I took a blood pressure drug when the underlying blood pressure was in that range. I wouldn’t even be able to stand upright.

Do I have a conclusion to draw from this?

Well, yeah: One conclusion is that obsessing over the blood pressure is probably driving my blood pressure up.

The other is, I need to go to the Mayo, not to a doctor in the wild. Mayo Clinic physicians are salaried employees: they have no incentive to overprescribe treatments and medications. Not to be driven crazy or bullied into unnecessary treatment is worth the endless drive through the homicidal traffic.

And finally, what is needed is an occasional glass of wine.

Prosit!

 

Of phones and securities and numerals…

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So, to start with the securities part: We’re told yesterday’s crash is a “normal,” nay even a “healthy” correction. The US market has wobbled around all day, closing up 567 points, though that’s not true all over the planet. My investment guru doesn’t seem to be very exercised. Says he: “We were certainly due for a pullback as the market has been going straight up for some time. I don’t think it is anything to get overly worried about. We do have a position that we will sell to raise cash if the market breaks down further.” Meanwhile, at the endlessly entertaining circus playing inside the Beltway, we have this amusing story.

Ever feel like you fell off the tightrope spanning the Gorge of Unreality? 😀

Yesterday I flew into one of my fits of hummingbird rage when SDXB jangled me up in the middle of the tedious morning blood-pressure measuring ritual, causing a spike into the 140s. DAYum, but I hate the sound of the accursed phone ringing.

Once I calmed down and alit on a branch somewhere, I began to reflect upon the effing phones, which very rarely are rung by friends. Most people email me these days. Usually what’s on the other end of the line is a robocaller, and of course that’s what made me so angry — I assumed it was another nuisance call. The phone is so fucking annoying because — among other things — it is so fucking LOUD.

For safety (so that I can reach a phone if I fall), there’s an extension in every room, many of them within easy reach of the floor. All well and good, in a little-old-lady sense, except…that adds up to eight phones!

No wonder the things lift you up out of your seat when they ring in chorus!

Contemplating this state of affairs, I chanced to wonder if it was possible to adjust the volume on the things. Or even turn the damn janglers altogether OFF.

Dug out the owner’s manuals. Believe me, figuring it out was not easy — the instructions are scattered in three places through 40 pages of obscure how-to instructions for functions you do not want, never have wanted, and never will want. But finally, LO! I did discover that not only can the volume be turned way down, you actually can turn the ringers off. Not only that, but the annoying, incomprehensible talking caller ID on the ancient Panasonic hidden in the family room cabinetry — which mysteriously is compatible with the vast set of Uniden cordless phones — actually can be made to SHUT UP!

I’ve tried to shut that thing up in the past, with no luck. Even though the manual says it can be done, it directs you to a function button that does not exist on the set! Of course. But somehow, by accident, I managed to shut it off. The other handsets were pretty easy to fix; turned off all but two ringers, and those I turned down as low as they will go.

So now when the phone rings, it’ll be annoying but it should not be tooth-jangling.

Speaking of annoyances, I made a surprising little discovery. If you take a nap in the afternoon — or maybe just lay down for an hour or so, without even sleeping — you can beat the tendency of your blood pressure to rise late in the day.

Yesterday I was pretty infuriated (you wonder why my BP is high? Because I’m mad as a hummingbird about half my waking hours…) when as an afterthought I took an evening reading and found the damn blood pressure elevated into the 140s. It hasn’t been that high in weeks, even though the hip thing has had me too crippled to walk more than about a quarter-mile — and that far only in the past couple days.

Yesterday was the last day of Week 4 in my six-week effort to lower average blood pressure into the low 120s or (preferably) the 110s, and this stratospheric set of readings was the last reading of the week! To my dismay, it pushed the week’s average from 125.7/82 to 128.4/82.7. I was enraged, needless to say, since there hadn’t been a reading in the 140s for quite a while.

Think this happened because right beforehand I spent two hours with a computer on my lap and my feet crossed and propped on an ottoman, without once budging. Obviously, that kind of immobility can’t be good for you. But still…seriously??????? 146/90? Really????

This morning, though, after an hour or so of physical therapy exercises and dog wrangling, the figures were back in their more typical range: 121/82. Not as low as I’d like, but not life-threatening.

Out of curiosity, then, I decided to see what would happen if I took a nap. In the past researchers have imagined that a regular afternoon siesta may lower overall blood pressure (this is not a great source, but just now I’m feeling too lazy to look up the studies…they’re out there, though). Some speculate that the mere anticipation of an afternoon nap may lower the numbers. More recently, though, other researchers claim to have found evidence that napping increases the risk of hypertension.

Well, I’m not fond of sleeping in the daytime. Life is too short as it is, without wasting part of every day in bed. On the other hand, I sure don’t want to take those pills. So as a practical matter, I didn’t actually fall asleep this afternoon. But I did lay down and rest. The result: average at 5:30 p.m. was 118/81, one helluva lot better than yesterday, that’s for sure. And the lowest reading in that set was an amazing 114/81.

Cardiodoc would be ecstatic.

 

Incommunicado

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Now HERE’S the magical mystery wonder balm…

I’ve been incommunicado for a week or so with an episode of back pain SO colorful that I could barely hobble down the hallway. You know it’s bad when I don’t even feel well enough to write a blog post while perched atop a heating pad on the bed…

Don’t know what I did to bring this one on…only thing I can figure is maybe it was trying too fast to get up to a three-mile daily walk, by way of beating back the fat and the blood pressure. Whatever happened, it damn near crippled me. Yesterday it finally began to subside a little, and today it still is better. So I guess it’s not my body telling me it wants its hip replacement now, not later…

So…did the Magical Mystery Wonder Herbal Balm work on this? I have no idea. Maybe: the pain started to ease a day or so after I started smearing it on morning noon and night. But in the past the infallible cure has always been tincture of time, which, after about ten days should be kicking in right about now.

The blood pressure, interestingly enough, is also subsiding! It actually has dropped in spite of my not having any real exercise at all for the past 10 or 12 days. The only motion I’ve been able to manage — and that, painfully — has been the physical therapy routine I learned the last time this happened. And that’s not what you’d call aerobic. 😀  So far this week the average has been 126/83, and that’s WITH a spike into the 140s caused by a few moments of truly bracing pain.

So. I’m beginning to feel some hope that I can get the numbers consistently into the low 120s and high teens — without benefit of drugs — within about six weeks.

It’s interesting that this is occurring in the absence of daily exercise, because in theory a major factor in bringing down BP through lifestyle change is getting a decent amount of mild but real exercise. Apparently, though, weight loss is far more important: managed to drop 3.5 pounds since January 15, and the decline in BP measurements has closely tracked the drop in avoirdupois. When you think about it, 3.5 pounds ain’t much — on a serious diet, you should be able to lose 2 pounds a week without feeling very deprived.

Another factor may be getting off the sauce: I decided to teetotal as part of the BP Reduction Project. I can’t really see much connection, though, between the moment of climbing on the wagon and the moment of BP drop — in fact, one evening I went over to my son’s house and had two or three glasses of wine by way of back pain analgesia, and the next day, all day, the measures were in the teens. Intrigued by this development, a few days later I had one (count it, 1) bourbon & water at about the same time of day, and found exactly no difference the following morning.

So…hm. I figure the operative factor is mostly the weight loss. In theory, getting rid of even five pounds can drop blood pressure measurably.

Today I can walk, and I think I can sling a leg over the back of a bicycle, so after traffic dies down I probably will pump up the tires and go for a bike ride. While it’s not weight-bearing exercise, at least it IS moving around. Sort of. And it gives you a chance to ogle the neighbors’ houses, anyway. Weather is beyond gorgeous here during the day — this is the time of year for bike rides.

Heh heh… I may have to jump off the accursed Water Wagon, too. In amongst the endlessly contradictory research reports about blood pressure and cardiovascular disease comes this latest gem of wisdom: Booze is good for you! Your fevered brain is less fevered on 2½ glasses of wine a day.

Well! If they’d bothered to ask me, I coulda told ’em that. 😀

Ouch!

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The honored Back has been out of commission for a week, taking a hip with it. This, I think is the worst back outage I’ve enjoyed since Anna the Ger-Shep was a pup, when she put me in the hospital by charging a passing mammoth pick-up and trying to bring it down by the oil pan — dragging me with her. Yesterday I was in so much pain I could barely walk around the house.

This predicament is not helped by the allergies to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen… Nor, we might add, by the stress-inducing blood-pressure conundrum.

So crippled up have I been that I’d pretty much decided this must be It: the osteoporosis in that hip has decided to assert itself, so now must be the time for a hip replacement. Holeeeee shit! Just what I need to make my life fun.

This conclusion: especially because if I did anything to hurt myself I don’t know what it was. Or it wasn’t very credible. The pain started after I walked three miles one afternoon: two alone, and one with Ruby the Corgi, who goes right along at a fast clip. But that puts us into the “not very credible” zone (not to say the Twilight Zone…): I walk three-mile stretches all the time and never induce any back or hip pain. That is the proximate event…but we have no evidence that it was the cause.

WhatEVER! Yesterday I was seriously crippled up.

That didn’t stop me from accepting a last-minute dinner invitation from my son last night. Managed to get the pooches into the car, but he had to get them out and, later, put them back in.

And herein lies the interesting development:

Over dinner last night, I fell off the accursed Water Wagon with a resounding thud. Lost track of how much box wine I swilled, but it was plenty. At least three glasses, but when you’re refilling a few drops at a time, it’s kinda hard to judge.

By the time I got home, the back hurt a little less. Yes, I had done a set of physical therapy exercises at his house, whilst he was cooking. But…they haven’t helped one little bit over the past week or so. So there’s no reason to think they would have helped then. Probably the grape-derived anaesthetic was what did the job.

Meanwhile, let us say I happened to acquire a little jar of herbal pain-killer. You’re supposed to rub the stuff on your bod’ to evince a magical mystery rheumatiz cure. Right.

Welp, any port in a storm. So I smear this stuff on around the sore joints.

This morning, I roll out of the sack, spend an hour or so fiddling with the dogs and killing time, and then take my blood pressure — an annoying procedure scheduled twice a day. I expect to spike high, because alcohol does jack up your BP.

But…..lo!

Now, I’ll say: yesterday the BP was relatively low (not on target, but not alarming) throughout the day: Average 128/79 despite one reading of 136/84. But still: that was after three weeks of booze-free living. And…in the absence of the, uhm, analgesic herb.

It’s unlikely that said herb’s active ingredients will be absorbed into the bloodstream through the skin. Human skin is fairly impermeable. Although nicotine is absorbed readily, most chemicals that we come in contact with — detergent ingredients, for example — are not. Nevertheless: an average systolic below 120? And two readings at 116/7n? Shortly after ingesting a different chemical well known for its capacity to inflate blood pressure score?

To coin a phrase: holy sh!t.

Throw open the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest (i.e., the Internet) and google the active ingredient + blood pressure. And damned if there isn’t a study — in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, which has an impact factor of 12.5(!) — showing that the stuff did in fact reduce blood pressure in a small test group. The authors theorize that the result was caused by the ingredient’s tendency to reduce stress.

Yeah.

The back is somewhat better this morning — still hurts, but walking up the hallway no longer requires bracing oneself against the wall. The fact that it’s getting better suggests (maybe) an injury, rather than crumbling bones. This morning after a hot bath, I rubbed a bunch more of the magical  mystery cream into the hip joint and lower back, and also into the mastectomy scars, which are fine during the day but in the wee hours hurt enough to wake one out of a sound sleep. If the active ingredient actually does absorb through the skin, presumably by this evening I’ll be relaxed enough to reproduce those figures — preferably without benefit of the vino.

In herbi veritas?

Well, i KNEW i had something worth writing…

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But damned if I can figure out what it is…

Several quiet days here at the Funny Farm: no serious drama going on in the ’hood, no excitement to belly-ache about — at least, none that’s not going on in Washington, precincts that have become too tiresome to consider. 😉

A new client sent a paper he intends to deliver at a conference this week. Very interesting piece. The guy’s senior faculty in a decent university’s “Communications” program — that’s what we call “J-school” these days. And so he has something to say, and that something happens to be on a subject I enjoy reading about. So that was a day and a half of pleasurable reading for pay.

The flu continues to make its rounds here in Lovely Uptown Arizona. Friends and foes are dropping left and right. But so far I’ve managed to evade it, for reasons I do not understand. Either I’m one of the 10% to 30% who happen to be protected by this year’s flu shot, or the theory that keeping your hands scrupulously clean works.

If the latter is true, here’s the key: Get yourself a plastic box full of the harshest kitchen counter sanitizing wipes you can find in the store. Place it in the car, and also install a plastic bag or small waste basket for used wipes. Then: every single time you go anywhere and climb back into the car, pull out a wipe and rub it thoroughly over your hands; then wipe down the steering wheel and your car keys and key fob.

Et voilà! If you’ve picked up any bugs on your hands, that ought to kill off a fair number of them.

As soon as you get home, wash your hands well with soap and water. If you have to unpack groceries, be sure to wash your hands again after doing so — you can be sure any cashier or grocery clerk with a sore throat or a runny nose will have smeared bags and boxes and packages with germs.

This amounts to a fair amount of obsessive hand-scrubbing. But presumably after you’re back in the house, you can go about your business without removing any more skin from your paws.

In an office? I dunno. If you have to work in one of those accursed cubes, there’s not a helluva lot you can do to protect yourself. The guy next to you is coughing his viruses in the air, and since the boss is unlikely to let you sit in front of the computer with a gas mask on, you really can’t do much about that. But I think it’s still probably worth hiding a box of counter wipes in your desk and wiping your hands every time you have to leave the cube and move about the infected area. Which will be just about everyplace in an office or school.

Got kids? Forget it. Just get used to the fact that you’re gonna catch the flu. What doesn’t kill you makes you better.

Otherwise, rather little of any constructive import has been going on. I’ve not written a damn word on the noveloid in progress, nor have I updated the Plain & Simple Press Blog (b-a-a-a-ad human!).

No, that’s wrong: The Kid and I met at the Great Desert University the other day and applied for a DUNS number. That has so far not been forthcoming. Whenever (if ever) it gets here, we will then be able to get ourselves certified as a woman-owned small business, which will put us in a preferred category for certain federal contracts. We pledged to look for state contracts, too…but so far I have not managed to elevate myself off my derrière long enough to find out about that. I think probably it will be best to get that DUNS number before spending a lot more time on this effort.

Planning to go to the scribbler’s group this weekend. O’course, I made the same plan last month, but at the last minute did not feel well enough to take on the endless drive to the far west Valley. This month the presenter will be going on about using Word’s “Styles” function to format your manuscript. Well…I already know how to do that, thank you very much. But I do have a book MS in progress that I could play with during this workshop. Or just use some of the draft noveloid MS.

My idea for the nonfiction thing, which is essentially complete and will be easy to put together, is to market it in hard copy. But really. When you come right down to it: why? None of these books is making much money. In any given month, Funny about Money generates about 15 times as much income as all the P&S Press books combined. And it’s a fraction of the work. My plan right now is to “publish” bookoids for free through separate, dedicated websites. Then if anyone wants to buy the whole combined damnfool thing, they can download it for a modest fee from that site. Or for the same modest fee at Amazon.

This, of course, requires me to explain what I’m trying to do for the blogging empire’s website wrangler. And trying to make sense of that in writing? More work than I feel like doing just now.

Can you get spring fever in January?

The Blood Pressure Project: Update

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Exactly one week ago I decided that enough was enough with the blood pressure conundrum. By this time last week, I had myself so worked up that I was spiking 150/97 readings(!!) and feeling just like you feel when you have to make a cold call and tell or ask some total stranger something, or like you feel in the 6th grade when you’re about to take a math or spelling quiz. At length I realized that the tension caused by obsessing over this bullshit simply had to be what is pushing up those crazy, never-before-seen spikes.

So I decided to put the damn Omron contraption away, close the BP spreadsheet, and stop thinking about the stuff for a full week.

That was good.

The project was to do a daily two-mile dog-free walk, an evening 1.5-mile dog walk (for a total of 3.5 miles a day), plus one 20-minute yoga practice, plus the 10-minute back-pain exercises the physical therapists showed me some time ago.

Three days into said project, along came…amazing! an ocular migraine! Sumbeach! A pair of pinking shears meandering across the field of vision… Who’d’ve thunk it?

I haven’t had a true, verifiable ocular migraine in years. Many years. This cleared, as of yore, in about 15 minutes, leaving behind a mild headache. Mercifully in my precincts these auras do not end in severe pain. That’s something. I guess.

This was followed, that very night, by the single most brain-blowing terrifying nightmare I’ve had since I was a small child. It was really, I think, more on the order of a hallucination: awaking in the midnight darkness, I heard two men in the front of the house, speaking to each other in subdued voices.

For an instant, I was dead convinced there was a pair of prowlers in the living-room. Mercifully, the dogs were on the bed and I had not completely lost my grip: if there really was anyone in the house, the dogs would be going screaming batshit. They were not. They were awake (dogs are often awake at night, interestingly) and just sitting there quietly. Unfazed. Unalerted. Totally unbatshit.

It actually took a second to persuade myself that the “visitors” were phantasms, because if they were real the dogs would have…well….noticed.

Stress and migraine are connected, and migraine is also associated with a wide variety of sleep disturbances, among them dramatic nightmares. And it can take a few days for an episode of stress to evince its various side-effects.

Come dawn, now freshly re-obsessed, I decided I should see what the BP was, in light of the Episode of the Fantastical Night Visitors. So dragged out the contraption again, hating every minute of it. Dogs yapping in the background (not exactly a restful environment), the average was 130/84. Not great, but a far cry from stroke-worthy. As of that evening, the overall average for the several days since I’d decided to quit obsessing was 125.5/79.4. That also is not ideal, but it certainly isn’t in the “high blood pressure” range. Unless, of course, you’re in the business of peddling pharmaceuticals…

Today — another couple days later — the average of readings is 124.6/84.6. So it doesn’t look like I’m going to die soon.

The exercise routine has gone well except for yesterday, when I had so many out-of-the-house things to do that there really was no time for walks or calisthenics. A shallow search online did not come up with any very credible figure for how long it should take for a determined lifestyle change to affect one’s blood pressure. Many sites insist that lifestyle changes do lower moderately inflated BP, but they decline to say how long one might expect this to take. One (1) modestly credible site suggests about 10 weeks.

Meanwhile, YouTube has any number of nice videos demonstrating various yoga routines. Picked a couple by a character named Adriene, who has a pleasing demeanor and does not annoy with too much rah-rah or very much woo-woo. Her “relaxation” practice and her “back pain” practice are nice, easy routines that each occupy about 20 minutes. Then I found a guy who demonstrates beginning weight-lifting workouts for the geriatric set! Chortle! These are absurdly easy but go on long enough to work up a very light sweat, which is supposedly ideal for circulatory purposes.

So. Today is the start of another week, during which I hope not to see the damned machine for seven whole days and nights. Barring a rainstorm (highly unlikely), nothing should get in the way of the proposed fitness exercises, spread out, on any given day, from 7 in the morning to ten at night. And then we shall see what we shall see.