Much Ado About Something

 I missed September's blog post, but honestly, I didn't have a lot to report. It was a busy month filled with trying to go on with normal life while missing someone who left an enormous hole. The one highlight of September was M's birthday. I can't believe my oldest kid is now 25! (Geez, that makes me old too, doesn't it? Though I can hardly complain. I mentioned hot flashes the other day while talking to my dad, and he immediately responded with a comment about how wrong it is to hear his daughters talking about menopause-related stuff!)

So here we are in October, and it's been a crazy busy, when I thought I would have a breather. I generally LOVE October; we have fall break, which usually lessens my load. But no. Turns out that when only two of your kids are still in school, fall break means less of a difference in your life. Not that I am not enjoying the cooler weather; I am, I am!!! It's so nice to go outside at 6am and actually shiver. (My body reacts that way to 70 degrees after such a long stretch of heat.) But between my new calling at church and the extra stuff like getting K up to the annual elk hunt and still plugging away on the audiobooks, I didn't get to just...be still. Not much.

The other real problem I have (besides the ongoing grieving process for Makena, which I realize is now my new normal) is that my blood pressure has decided that it no longer wants to stay put in the realm of "high but still acceptable." Do any of you long-term readers of this blog remember my lovely hypertensive crisis all those years ago? It's funny looking back now. It's certain (based on my symptoms) that my blood pressure spiked to dangerous levels before I got into urgent care two hours later, but I want to laugh at the urgent care doctor's cavalier diagnosis that it was just anxiety-related high blood pressure "and once you fix the anxiety, you'll fix the blood pressure, and blood pressure meds aren't the solution."

Fortunately for my sake, neither my cardiologist nor my primary care doc agreed with that assessment.

I've been taking blood pressure medication for ten years now, and for awhile it was working great. Slowly over the last two years, it has grown less and less effective. My PCP has been concerned but it wasn't until this year that she decided we had to do something about it. That required switching meds to one where we could increase the dosage (since I was already on the max dosage of my original med). But she wanted to do it gradually, so it started with adding the new med and decreasing the old one.

Unfortunately, my new body does not seem to care for the new med. Or rather, it doesn't seem to respond to the new med at all. My doc has now increased the dosage three times without any sign of improvement. Actually, my numbers started climbing even higher (probably because I'm only taking half of the original med, which still works). By last week my daily average was no different than the high numbers the original urgent care made me get an EKG for. And I was pretty much incapacitated by headaches all week. My PCP was out with a sick baby, so my messages asking "What the heck do I do now???" languished in the netherworld of a medical bureaucratic digital holding cell. When I finally managed to snag a virtual appointment with her, she was horrified. So was I, by that point! I was living with ice packs on my head and attempting not to throw up from any movement.

(Did I consider going to the ER? Of course I thought about it. ChatGPT even told me I'd better do it, when I researched what blood pressure numbers were worth going to the ER. But ultimately, having been down this road before, since taking a bath or using an ice pack and just refusing to live life would bring my numbers down some, I was pretty sure all that would happen at the hospital would be that my numbers would skyrocket even more because I hate any medical environment with a passion, they'd run a bunch of tests that would show nothing, give me something to bring my numbers down, and tell me to follow up with my doctor. I just skipped the-extra-high-numbers and the expensive tests and followed the rest of the plan.)

So. Per my PCP's orders, I am now taking a diuretic and once my numbers are not so insane, we will switch out the 2nd med for a new med. I do NOT like being on three meds, and the idea of adding a fourth makes me practically break out in hives. My doc knows me well because she prefaced this news with "Don't freak out!" She promises it is only temporary, but we'll see.

As for now, my numbers are still too high but not scary high, and I am living with mild, intermittent headaches so at least I have periods where I can get some stuff done without feeling like I need to curl into fetal position and whimper. Oh, and the diuretic makes me need to pee, but honestly, I can barely tell a difference since I already have the overactive bladder issues. *shrug*

I am grateful I have a body. I really, truly am!!! But geez, I am absolutely looking forward to the resurrected model.

Happy Fall, everyone! Enjoy the beautiful weather while it lasts!

I did enjoy my quick jaunt to the mountains. And so did K!