Pressured

So I’m out with a friend for dinner and another friend greets us. I get up to give him a hello and I see some weird cloudy sh*t moving in from the side of my vision. I hang into him as the clouds take over. I find myself staring into his blank stare. Now I’m sitting on the bench. My friend is sitting next to me. Also the blank stare. Twilight zone. “Are you OK?” Me: “Uh, What happened?”

One of these guys is a nurse. Thinks I had a stroke. Asks me to read some signs. (apparently when you have a stroke you can’t read for a while.) I read the signage. In the clear, only not quite. What the hell was that? A drop in blood pressure, he says, from standing up.  Great. I’ll spend the rest of my life sitting in a wheelchair afraid to greet anybody.

Now, a few years back, when I was having a helluva time trying to get a job out of grad school, I was having these amazing headaches. Stressed. Not sleeping. Whackjob 101. So the doctor says, blood pressure is borderline.  So on top of being stressed about everything else, I have to be reminded that I’m now MIDDLE AGED! So I take some low dose of BP medicine. My whole family is on this drug, so I feel like there has been some personal guinea pig action close to home. I won’t die from side effects. Aside from being so expensive I apply for a mortgage to get my first doses. (More stress/no insurance.) But al in all, a successful induction into the perma-pharma-addicted population. Headaches gone. Sleeping better. Ta-dah!

Fast forward two years: I get divorced, pull a disc in my back, go through physical therapy and get the sage advice to lose weight and get in shape. Today I have lost 15 pounds and am in the best shape I’ve been in 10 years. (See? There are a few silver linings to the dark cloud of breaking up.) But wait. The dark side. I am still using this blood pressure reducing crack. My nurse buddy takes my pressure: 103/58. I have the BP of a 16 year old living in  Sub-Saharan Africa. So my doctor says dump the drug and let’s see what happens. So this week is a big experiment. I am drug free to see if I’ve kicked the high blood pressure habit. If this is true, this is amazing. I thought once you go on that stuff you’re forever popping pills from pharmaceutical companies that take all your disposable income for the rest of your life, switching them with higher and higher priced versions as much as your body and insurance can tolerate. This is a pleasant surprise, baby. Preventative medicine can not only keep things from happening, it can reverse the verdict on some decisions.  Maybe I should give up smoking crack, too.