High Blood Pressure

[lerxstcat]

Holy crap, Lerx! I think taking all of those pills would raise my blood pressure just from the anxiety. Why is your BP so high?

I am overweight and also have congestive heart failure and diabetes. They all kind of feed into each other and over years of having these conditions undetected they just got worse and worse. When you have high blood pressure it makes it harder for your heart to pump blood through your system, and it gradually enlarges and the heart walls thin and weaken.

This causes my heart and lungs to be inefficient, and fluid builds up in my body. So in addition to the blood pressure meds I also take fluid pills to make my kidneys work harder to piss off the extra fluid. Because my heartbeat is now rapid, but weaker, I take digoxin to slow and strengthen the heartbeat. Digoxin is actually a synthetic variant of some kind of snake venom that would kill by stopping the heart, so there's a fine line between the therapeutic dose and a toxic dose. There was recently a recall on Digitek which is a generic version, because they'd accidentally made them too strong. Naturally I was taking Digitek and was getting dizziness and nausea because I got ODed for a few months.

Believe me, even the docs shake their heads when they look at all the meds I take. But I've stayed alive the last 10 years because of those meds, and during a time when I couldn't get them, that's when I had the stroke. So that taught me that I don't need to try and be a hero by not taking meds and being the tough guy. I kind of fucked myself by trying it when I became unemployed and figured I couldn't afford the meds.

Really, I couldn't afford to NOT take them, and learned the hard way.;

But with all these problems, I will probably live longer than someone who just feels like shit and ignores it until the day they drop from a heart attack. My older brother did that even though I am sure he had all the same conditions that I have, and that we know our father had, who died of a heart attack at age 54. My bro ignored me when I asked him to get himself checked out, and he died of a heart attack at age 57.

That is why I'm pretty vehement about not trying to be a hero. Besides, i took a lot of pills in my partying days anyway, so eating 20+ pills a day really doesn't bother me.

The fact that I don't cop a buzz from any of them bugs me more than taking them does, but the fact of getting to live really outweighs that!

[xxxcreaturexxx]

I completely understand what you are saying lerx. Although I am feeling better I know I will have a bad day, here and there, where I will feel light-headed. It happened last night so I just took it easy, watched a movie and went to sleep.