By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
There are many social issues to write about this week but I found out that a lot out there are struggling about their high blood pressure. The doctors call it hypertension. So I decided to print here my own story, about which friends and relatives had been told by email or thru FB. Here goes–
Been struggling to get vaccinated against covid. About a month ago. I went back for my 1st jab which was deferred due to high blood pressure (BP). I was about to be disqualified again due to high BP. Then the nurse told me to rest for 10 minutes. When she got again my BP she told me it was 160 over something and I was OK to be vaccinated. So I got my first shot.
When I went back the other week for the 2nd shot, my BP was again too high. Even one catapres could not bring it down from 180 over 110. So deferred again, and yet I was taking my maintenance med. Then my doctor friend, a former professor at SLU College of Medicine added another maintenance med. Still, no can do.
Then I remembered my doctor telling the story several times, whenever we had coffee, about patients whose BPs would not go down, or would go down temporarily and then shoot up again in a short while. He would say that almost always, such patients had already lost their kidneys. Lab analyses would readily show that their kidneys could not any more filter impurities like uric acid, creatinine, sugar, etc.
So he advised me to go for a lab analysis and he emailed me all the matters that should be detected by the lab– it was such a long list that I thought would cost a lot. Well, it did cost some.
At any rate, I struggled to accept the eventuality I could have lost my kidneys or a big part of them. Though I did not feel any sign of kidney disease and did not think so from my browsing of the internet. Consoling myself,I thought, at least, they should not be “almost gone.” So I had been feeling down the past many days, thinking about dialysis, costs, etc. I did not even have the right mental composure to fill up this space last week.
Then I mustered the courage to go for a lab test. The results came out yesterday, three pages. Of course, urinalysis included.
I rushed back to the office to open the stapled bunch of papers. Upon entering the door, my kid’s first question was, “So, do you have cancer?”
I coldly said, as I was struggling to remove the staple of the papers containing the results, “Let us see.”
Then I saw these: Uric acid—normal, sugar—normal, cholesterol (HDL, LDL)—normal, triglyceride—normal, creatinine—at the upper limit, etc., etc., etc. I immediately emailed these to my doctor-friend with the confident note, “Do I still have some years to live?”
The answer came back in a few moments. “CONGRATULATIONS!”
But no answer to why my BP was high. So I emailed back, “Is it because of STRESS?”
His answer was, “I would not be surprised considering the stress of your profession. Relax!”
I have to note that I have relatives on both my mother and father side who defied doctors’ efforts, with all the synthetic medicines, to lower their BPs. In my case, nothing worked—synthetic meds and alternative ones. But that would be another long story. And there is still my overweight which I am working on, and also another long story. I would fill you in later.
So there. I am now waiting for daylight so I could start a moderate effort at “de–stressing” and some light exercises, including yoga meditation and yoga exercises.
After a lot of thinking and more searching, I think I isolated the cause of my pesky high blood pressure. Am I seeing a light at the end of the tunnel? Our space has run out, so that would be for next week.**
