Well, now...

I’m finally recovering from a particularly nasty cold. I know I’m recovering because it’s after 2:00 AM and I’m up. Doesn’t happen when I’m sick, only when I’m well. I even tried to go to sleep. Wasn’t happening. Oh well.

This whole feeling better thing is fairly recent, too. As early as this afternoon, I still felt pretty miserable. But you know, I realized this evening that a large part of that was my blood pressure. This not having health insurance thing is starting to really get to me, now. Fortunately, three of the four drugs I have prescribed to control my BP are generics, so they may not be too expensive. I’ll find out soon enough, I don’t think I can afford to be without them anymore. My head is buzzing like a beehive right now, as it has for the past three days. Just for giggles, I thought I’d whip out the handy-dandy at-home blood pressure monitor and arm cuff and take a quick measurement. Haven’t done that since October. In October, I was at least taking my meds every other day, to try and make them stretch. But I forgot, and before I knew it, I wasn’t taking them at all. I have no idea when that stopped. Not having a daily schedule totally screws me up.

Right, so anyway, took a BP measurement this afternoon – 154/102. Feel free to search online. Most sites will tell you that’s not a very good reading. Well, now I know where the buzzing is coming from. Between taking decongestants and antihistamines so I could breathe, and forgetting my BP meds, I’m basically lucky to be coherent. Yay.

Time to find a way to get back into the habit of taking my meds. It didn’t help with my recovery. Granted, I’m still coughing up a small chunk of lung now and again, but what I thought might be an upper respiratory infection, secondary to the cold, is really just my BP being elevated to an extremely high level. Not a level that gets you hospitalized, it has to go up much more than that, but it is a level that must be controlled.

Something else this afternoon showed me. I will probably have to move. Altitude is a factor in blood pressure, and I’m at over 6,000 feet here in Colorado Springs (yes, that’s higher than Denver). Not until I finish school, but I think I need to move to a lower altitude at some point. Here, I have three pills directly, one indirectly, prescribed to control blood pressure. At a lower altitude, I might be able to drop one or two. I’m not happy about that, I really do like it here, but if I’m going to spend my evenings unable to function because my head feels like it’s full of bees, I don’t really have a whole lot of choice.