written on July 27, 2014
Today has not been a good day. Another Sunday, so part of me expects it to be a bad day.
Back in my junior year of college, a close friend of mine joked about how we always hated Sundays. Most stores were closed, or were open fewer hours, a lot of people attended church services or had family in town they had to do things with, there was always homework to do. But even though we generalized and said Sundays suck, the reality is we spent quite a few good Sundays together. The best was probably the Sunday we saw “The Shawshank Redemption.” Such a great movie. I remember the Sunday we saw it being a perfect day – an early autumn day, the sun shining, a nice breeze blowing, the quiet of the campus making us think there was no one else around. We hung out most of the rest of the day, sharing stories, talking about the future and where we wanted to go after film school.
That had been a good Sunday. Today though, not so much.
I woke up this morning, after a little over 8 hours of sleep (so rare for me these days) and I felt completely exhausted. I’m not sure words can aptly describe the feeling of fatigue that I felt. I had the beginnings of a migraine starting, but my body felt like lead. I had to pull myself out of bed to go to the bathroom, and even after that, I felt like anything but laying down would be a bad idea.
So I laid back down and decided to take my blood pressure. I haven’t done that at home for a few days but I knew it would be high this morning. During dialysis yesterday it peaked at 174/111, but today felt worse than that. And it was – 194/117. A few minutes later it was 192/114. An hour later, after taking my blood pressure medications, it was 186/112. I called my doctor, left a voicemail on his emergency line. He called back in about 15 minutes and said to increase the dosage of the drugs I had. Hoping that would do the trick, I took more meds. A few hours later, blood pressure was still 192/111 (at one point I checked it and it hit 210/118. After a few minutes, it came back down to 192/112).
Now I know I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a doctor (did you read the Disclaimer?), but in googling hypertension, it turns out that the headache, the fatigue and the high blood pressure means I should be going to the ER to be checked out. Of course, neither I nor my wife nor my doctor want me to do that. That’s going to be several hours of my Sunday gone while I lay in a bed in the ER and they pump blood pressure meds through an IV, and then give me a couple of pills on top of that to make sure we can get it under control. But can we get it under control?
The three medications I’m taking at the current dose aren’t helping. Sure, increasing the dosages might work, but at what point will the dosages start causing side effects? Right now, I have no side effects from my blood pressure meds because I’ve been taking them for so many years my body is used to them. But since I’m so sensitive to medication, I always get wary when starting a new drug (of which I’m now taking 7 prescription meds every day) or changing to a higher dose of something I’ve been taking. I admit, I’d be willing to suffer some side effects to get this blood pressure under control though. Living with high blood pressure every day is really no fun. I thought dialysis would be helping with it, but it seems to make it worse.
The ultimate test here would be to try different combinations of medications to get the blood pressure down, and keep it down, then see how the other side effects in my life are doing. I think if the blood pressure is lower, my migraines should go away. And I’m thinking if I can get rid of the migraines, it might lessen the restless legs syndrome that I feel.
If all of these symptoms are really caused by the fluid imbalance from the dialysis, then maybe if we get my blood pressure under control I could back to dialysis twice a week, instead of three times. That would definitely help with any fluid issues.
I guess in the short term it’s time to go get dressed so I can head over to the ER. Higher dosages aren’t helping and the blood pressure isn’t going down on its own. I’m still afraid that living with numbers this high means I’m doing some serious damage to my blood vessels, or my heart, or more damage to my kidneys. Any or all of those things would be bad – and would probably put me in a worse state than I’m already in. I’d much rather just go to the hospital and at least knock this down today. Maybe some damage has already been done, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it hasn’t.