Blood pressure, that is.

I embraced turning 60 on December 28, 2021.  I celebrated the year leading up to that monumental birthday by making a list of sixty things that I wanted to accomplish by my sixtieth birthday.  I managed to check many, but not all, of those things off of the list.  Those items that still remained got moved to the seventy by 70 list.  As an aside, it is hard to come up with this many things that you still want to accomplish.  I can tell you that floaters and high blood pressure, both which found me in the first quarter of my seventh decade, were not on that list!

When I first experienced them, the floaters were kind of scary given that my vision is not the greatest.  Once the doctor confirmed that the brown spots that looked like gnats flying by were no big deal, “just a natural part of the aging process,” I stopped worrying about that.  Now I don’t even notice them most of the time.

The blood pressure issue was not quite as simple.  It spiked one day and decided it liked that “altitude” and continued to fly high.   This definitely was not a good thing.  My blood pressure and I took a trip to the doctor.  She ran all of the diagnostic tests and concluded that  there was no obvious reason for it to be high so a prescription for blood pressure meds and monitoring at home were all that was needed.

Like every responsible adult, I googled, “What can I do to lower my blood pressure?”  Here is what I found:

• EXERCISE REGULARLY – I was already running roughly 15 miles a week.  I thought I was exercising regularly, but maybe I needed to do more.
• LIMIT ALCOHOL  – I don’t drink, not even casually, so there was nothing to limit.
• QUIT SMOKING – I never have smoked and never will!
• GET A GOOD NIGHT”S SLEEP –OK, now we are getting somewhere.  I sleep well most nights, but I likely don’t get enough sleep, 5 1/2 to 6 hours a night.  There are too many things that I want to do to “waste” time sleeping.  That said, I did make a mental note to get more sleep.
• EAT A HEALTHY DIET – I eat healthy meals, but needing energy to stave off tiredness when I really should go to bed made me a snacker.  I can’t say that my snack choices were always the best.  As Cookie Monster says, “Cookies are a sometimes food.”  Right, Cookie Monster.  And 10 pm almost every night is sometimes.
• REDUCE SODIUM – Because my hubby has had some heart issues, we don’t cook with salt at home…ever.   That’s why we never have people over for meals.  Lol!  You don’t realize how much salt is in foods until you don’t use it in your own cooking.  But those late night snacks…they have sodium.
• LIMIT CAFFEINE – Uh oh!  Here is the kicker.  I drank a couple cups of coffee in the morning and sometimes late at night with my cookies.  Coffee and cookies.  Yum!  And, during the day, I had a Diet Coke or two.  So yeah, I had a fairly substantial caffeine intake.  I told myself that this was no big deal.  I could switch to decaf coffee and caffeine-free Diet Coke.  Funny thing about this decision.  I often drank Diet Coke when we were eating out.  In our regular list of restaurant faves, only one of them had caffeine-free Diet Coke, which led me to continue drinking the caffeinated stuff more often than not.  On the flip-side, decaf coffee at home was an issue.  Weber would do almost anything for me…except drink decaf coffee.  So, I continued to drink one cup of caffeinated coffee at breakfast every morning.  I needed it to was down the blood pressure meds.  The win-win situation for me was eating breakfast out.  Decaf is always an option!  How bad can that be?  Still, I was limiting my caffeine consumption.  How bad can caffeine really be?
• LOSE EXTRA POUNDS – They always get the weight thing in there!  I have a few extra pounds, five or so.  The last of that baby weight.  Is there a statute of limitations on calling it baby weight?  My “baby” is now thirty.  Anyway, I’ll admit that I could stand to lose five pounds, but my body is happy where it is.  Those five pounds are lifelong friends and companions.  We’ve been through a lot together.  It is so hard to break it to them that they aren’t wanted anymore.  After all these years together, sending them packing with my cookies and caffeinated coffee just doesn’t seem like a proper good-bye.

Fast forward to to this week.

My blood pressure was happy and then it wasn’t.

Back to the doctor for more bloodwork.  “Everything looks great.  You must just be genetically disposed to elevated blood pressure because you are doing all of the right things.”  And she increased my med dosage.

Great.

So now, zero caffeine…not the occasional caffeinated Diet Coke or morning coffee. Weber and I now sip out of separate pots…but he still makes my coffee every morning.   After that, it is water for the rest of the day.   We are eating out less so that we can be more deliberate about sodium intake.  We are being more vigilant with regards to reading labels.  And, I am mustering the courage to finally say goodbye to my five favorite pounds of the last thirty years.

In the big scheme of life, these are all simple things.  I know that many people are dealing with far worse, and less controllable, circumstances than I am.   My experience with these blood pressure issues, however, is a reminder to me of what a fine-tuned machine our bodies are and how one thing, big or small, can affect so much.  One small thing can send our health into a downward spiral.  The positive spin is that one small thing can also turn us in a positive direction.  We have no control over our genetic make-up, but we have one-hundred percent control over our daily choices.

Choose wisely, my friends!