I had a recent unpleasant surprise during a checkup, and that was high blood pressure that had jumped from a prehypertensive range into Stage 2 hypertension at 152/101. The last reading I recalled getting at a doctor’s office was about 120/80. The lower number (diastolic) had been up for a little while, but not budged much for a couple of years. Then it budged a lot over the span of about a year.
Keeping blood pressure in a healthy range is important to heart health, and other organs like the kidneys; high blood pressure indicates the heart is working harder than it should be to move blood through the body, and it can be caused by added weight, stress, smoking, and high sodium intake. The systolic number (the one on top of the fraction) indicates the pressure exerted as the heart pumps, and the diastolic number measures the sustained pressure within the blood vessel between heartbeats.
Long-term, untreated hypertension can cause arteries to harden and create rough patches on the inner lining that collect fat that normally would have passed through blood vessels, creating plaques.
Besides being strained by high blood pressure, the heart is a muscle that needs blood flowing to it as well as through it. Decreased blood supply to the heart tissue can cause angina (chest pain), irregular heart rhythms, or even a heart attack. The left side of the heart pumps oxygenated blood throughout the body, and hypertension can cause a thickening of the left ventricle and increase the risk of heart attack.
In the kidneys and retinas of the eyes, scarring in small blood vessels from sustained high pressure can cause kidney damage and vision loss, and in the brain it can cause stroke when blood clots become lodged in narrowed arteries.
My reading prompted the doctor to advise monitoring and recording at home a few times a week, return to compare readings in about a month, and talk about blood pressure medications if it hadn’t gone down.
Just visiting the doctor can cause what has anecdotally been called “white coat hypertension,” meaning the stress of a doctor’s visit can cause blood pressure to rise at the sight of the doctor’s “white coat.” But if that were true, couldn’t it also be true that other regular daily stressors would cause the blood pressure to rise?
My guess is over the last couple of years, considering the pandemic and other ongoing tensions, everyone’s blood pressure has gone up a couple of points. The morning I went in, I had already been at work for a little while, I could tell my shoulders and neck were tight, and I was starting to get a headache. It may be overly optimistic, but I’m hoping that the visit itself had at least a little to do with it. I’m also hoping my weight had a lot to do with it, because that’s something I’m already working on. Not happy it came to that, but glad to have one more kick in the pants going forward.
Not being able to find a manual blood pressure cuff to buy, I borrowed an automated reader from my parents and found out hypertension runs on both sides of my family. Whether this had been discussed and it went in one ear and out the other, or I just accepted it as something that inevitably happened to “older” people, I don’t know, but I would rather wait a couple of decades to start down that road with medication if I can help it.
Coming to the end of my first week focused on calorie counting and getting more activity, I am down by about three pounds and my blood pressure is measuring in the normal systolic range and no higher than 93 in the diastolic range, and as low as 83, which is in the prehypertension category.
