Fun with blood pressure!

Now that I am back in the fray, I spent some time at a top-notch dentist.

Background: The only thing NOT broken on me is my teeth. The occasional cavity or plaque is about as exciting as it gets in almost 4 decades.

So aside from having to remove my gold necklace during a panoramic X-Ray, I was a bit disturbed to find my blood pressure was some 20 points over normal for someone my age. Granted, the morning had been fast and stressy, but I was still unhappy about the mechanized readout just before the tooth cleaning. As the hygenist scraped away, I mulled what yet another high BP reading might mean to me.

Several months ago, I wandered in to a doctor's clinic to find out if I was healthy or whatnot. The diagnosis was a resounding, "yes", but I registered high on the blood pressure meter. I am aware of the fact that a certain anxiety exists when visiting the Doctor/Dentist/CPA, but this flew in the face of my medical history and the struggle I endured as a child/teen to keep from passing out due to low blood pressure. In many ways, I welcomed the ability to not faint from standing up too quickly at a public event, or even have a pulse that kept medical professionals from freaking out when hooking up random equipment to my body.

I still remember getting my wisdom teeth extracted and the Orthodontist proclaiming how low my blood pressure was at the time. It still didn't prevent me from almost punching him in the face under anaestheasia when he cracked one of my teeth to aid in extracting it (this is not an exaggeration).

DENTAL SUPRISE!

Regardless, today has been a harrying experience. What made matters worse was talking with my mother and father in two separte conversations about the day's developments. One suggested I should start on ACE inhibitors while the other reassured me it was a transient event and I should re-check when I was rested to get a truer reading. All this happening as I was driving home from work, so I took a chance and decided to stop by an urgent care clinic to see if they could take a BP reading with me in my current condition.

This is when things took a comical turn.

I would laugh if it wasn't for the fact that it was ME suffering from potential health problems, but I pulled into the parking lot of a local clinic and marched in to the waiting area to be seen.

The young female clerk was busy outprocessing a woman who had just had her child seen by the clinic doc, and I patiently waited (with an ugly throbbing pain near my clavicle - is that the subclavian artery?) while they finished. After a minute or so, I leaned up against the counter.

"Hi. I am feeling like shit today. My blood pressure is really high - there's a pain near my chest and I was wondering if someone might be able to take my blood pressure? Anyone who can put a cuff on me and take a reading?"

The poor girl almost fell backward in her chair in an attempt to alert the nurse on duty, but she ushered me in and I flopped down in a chair with an armrest while she fumbled with an automatic BP cuff and meter.

Now the funny part:

As I sat in the medi-chair half aware of what was going on, the young desk clerk was trying her hardest to secure the BP cuff to my forearm. Even though I had my shirtsleeve pulled up, she kept insisting on wrapping the cuff midpoint of my Ulna. I am a fairly lighthearted person, so I gently insisted that I had "seen it wrapped around the upper arm" in the movies. The poor girl embarassedly wrapped the cuff about my upper arm and set the computer to task. Within a few seconds, the entire contraption was beeping loudly and flashing the following display:

146
101

Said young woman almost knocked me over in an attempt to turn the whole thing off with the POWER button.

Even at this hour of the night, I don't know what scared me more. The fact that I had a high "situational" reading, or whether the clerk was trying to shut the machine up since it was alerting that the BP reading was NOT NORMAL.

Fortunately, I talked with the NP on the floor and she reassured me not to panic regarding the high reading and to rest a bit and come back later to get a baseline reading.

Sensible? Maybe.

Getting old sucks.