I’m stuck in my worst nightmare thanks to discovering at the start of the year that I have blood pressure higher than Pete Doherty on his wildest nights. Not that the blood pressure is the problem. I felt fine at the time. The problem is coping with the consequences.
I’m told that unless my blood pressure can be reduced to something vaguely approximating normal then I significantly increase the risk of any number of my organs (kidneys, heart, eyes, brain, probably others too, but not the Hammond) deciding that on the whole they’ve had rather a busy life and now they’d quite like to retire to the countryside and keep bees. My understanding of the human body isn’t sufficient that I have a choice other than to take the medical profession at its word.
Whilst I’m not averse to changing my diet (and indeed I am doing so) and exploring other non-prescription methods for lowering my blood pressure, drugs are the only realistic option for rescuing it from the alpine pass in which it is presently lost.
Prior to this year I spent a good deal of my free time engaged in all kinds of jobs outdoors or making significant amounts of man glitter in the workshop. Oh, and swimming (indoors, in this case). I’ve spent over thirty-five years working in IT and it’s a joyful thing to swap the electron-wrangling for producing objects that can be seen without the need for scientific instruments.
And there’s where it all goes pear-shaped.
Regardless of which drugs I take (there have been, and indeed still are, many) it would appear that most of the time my body just can’t cope once my blood pressure gets as low as “Hmmm. Perhaps you’ll be ok if you’re lucky”. Initially it starts with my hands getting slightly shaky, then my knees. Soon I realise that I’m not as clear-headed as I want to be. The shakes get worse. I start to feel tired. Even light physical exercise becomes exhausting. Walking to the compost heap at the end of the veggie plot leaves me gasping for breath.
A couple of nights back I became so dizzy and disorientated that I had to lie down on the floor until the sensation passed and I was no longer likely to faint. Regularly I just have to sprawl out on the sofa and sometimes sleep for a few hours.
Obviously this puts quite a significant crimp on what I can do in the garden. I work in bursts of at most an hour, sitting down if possible, then crash out for a while. Any job in the workshop that involves tools that have an appetite for fingers or other parts of one’s anatomy are clearly out. Jobs that merely involve brute force and ignorance, of which I have always had a plentiful supply, are now beyond me. Nor can I do much with a computer, given that operating a mouse when one’s fingers won’t stay where they were put is quite tricky. That last is a bit of a bugger given that I still need to work.
Even making a salad for lunch has become a gamble on whether there will be unwanted protein supplement with the sliced onions.
Much of the time I also dare not drive because I know that I’m not in as much control of the vehicle as I’d want. I’m certainly not going to attempt to navigate the M5 car park.
And of course all this messing about with my circulatory system has taken place over the course of the hottest Summer the UK has on record. What could possibly go wrong?
To suggest that all this crap has had a seriously negative impact on my mental health is not far short of voicing the notion that the top of Everest might be slightly slippery. My body is, to coin a phrase, fucked. Most of what I have to keep me entertained now is in the space behind my eyeballs and frankly some of that looks as though it came out of a David Cronenberg film.
I have therefore decided that one of the few productive things I can do is to write, and rather more than I generally post here. God knows why. This is probably the longest piece of non-technical writing that I have produced since my English ‘O’ Level, back when the New Romantics were actually new.
I’ve no idea what I’m going to write about. Whatever comes into my head, I guess. It’s entirely possible that a significant proportion will document my pissed-offness with the world. I am after all old enough now to qualify as a grumpy old man and I fully intend to claim that distinction. I’ve earned it.
I’m not looking for weird and wacky ways to fix whatever has gone wrong with my body. My background is science and engineering. I don’t do “woo”. And that’s certainly something I should certainly write about. Possibly frequently.
