The Pressure

This year started off weird.

I woke up on my (50th!) birthday in January with an out-of-nowhere (seriously, I felt fine the night before) bronchial infection (bronchitis was the best guess, and yes I needed antibiotics and an inhaler if I remember correctly) and then my parents caught Covid in February.  Before they tested and were just frighteningly unwell,  I went over (in an N95) to drop them off some meds and noticed that my Dad was checking his blood pressure.  I asked why, as my Dad and I have both always had very low blood pressure and he said that his was now elevated enough to monitor.  And Mom was monitoring hers too.

So, on a whim, I checked mine, which has always been almost stupidly low, and it was elevated.  Which for me, is a BIG change.

I bought a home machine.

I started to monitor my blood pressure regularly.  It was much higher than it has been all my life.  This concerns me.

I mention this to a naturopath I saw in early Spring.  She tells me this is normal for an aging body.  I still don't like it.

I mention it to my doctor later in Spring.  She has me monitor twice a day for a couple of weeks.  When I go back with this information she circles a few numbers and tells me that I don't have enough "concerning" readings for us to do anything about it.  She tells me what numbers are high enough to be worrying.  I keep monitoring.  And then I stop because I'm not hitting those "scary" numbers. Not often anyway.  I work on cutting back on the amount of salt I add to things.  Something my old doctor had told me to do when I was getting "blacking out" going on when I was standing up.  (A low blood pressure thing.) 

Not related, but relevant to the story.... one of my brothers had a not-quite-heart-attack a few years ago and I kind of forget but they might have put some stents in or something but he had heart blockages that were unusual for his age so they asked if I wanted to be part of a study to try to help reduce heart issues in families with a tendency for that kind of thing and so I've been monitored remotely, off an on by a Vancouver based Cardiologist for the last however many years.

We had a check in call a couple of weeks ago and when he asked if I had any heath changes since the last time we talked (two years ago) I mentioned that my blood pressure has been elevated compared to how it's been the rest of my life.  He asked me to monitor and record it for the next few weeks, which I've been doing and, uh.... awkwardly, it turns out my readings are lower than they were when I was monitoring in spring.

Now, there may be a couple of reasons for this.  One being that I have reduced my salt intake.  Not eliminated it, but I am aware of it and trying to change how much I take, especially how much I sprinkle on my food/meals.

But I also had the terrible thought the other day that spring was baseball season and this was my first year following a team and I found it stupidly stressful and now I'm wondering if baseball had my blood pressure elevated....??????

I mean I'll find out again in spring if/when I start watching again because my blood pressure right now is ok.  Not perfect, and not where it used to be "back in the day" but it's also lower than it was half a year ago with some readings actually back to what I'm used to.  So I'm wondering.

Could I be "allergic" to baseball?  And if so.... how do I learn to enjoy it without making my system a stressed out mess!?