Under Pressure

I've been living with high blood pressure for the last four years.  At one point it rang up something absurd like 192/110, which freaked the piss out of my doctor and put a real scare into me...especially when he said that if I didn't make some changes a catastrophic stroke was imminent.  He put me on lisinopril and I almost immediately developed the dreaded lisinopril cough.  While the medication worked great and kept my BP from redlining, I was hacking like Doc Holliday minus the six-shooters and pithy one-liners.  So, he tried a couple of others and we finally settled in on metoprolol which worked just fine.  He also recommended that I stop being so sedentary (actually he said I needed to 'get my ass to the track', my doc is kind of blunt).

I didn't get serious about working out and watching my diet until spring of this year.  That's when I began running at least three times a week, using the goofy eliptical trainer when my knees acted up.  By the end of this summer I was stringing four 10 minute miles together, once even knocking out three miles in 26:45...and I say once because my knees were screaming at me for a few days after that one.  Lately, I've been incorporating some crossfit into my workouts just to kind of mix things up.  The results?  I'm down about 12 lbs from my all time high (which we aren't going to talk about).  But wait, there's more...

In August, I ran out of metoprolol and never went back to get my prescription renewed.  That was kind of a dumb thing to do because you aren't supposed to just quit blood pressure meds cold turkey like it was smack or meth or model airplane glue...your advised to cut back on the dosage to give your body a chance to gradually adapt to not having the medication around to regulate whatever it is supposed to regulate.  This past Friday I finally made the time to go in to get my prescription renewed...and a funny thing happened.  My blood pressure reading, completely off of medication for almost 90 days, came in at 128/80, well within normal range.  To call me pleasantly surprised would be an understatement, especially after my doctor said I had essentially cured my hypertension...

Now, I'm not completely out of the woods yet.  I still have to get my BP checked regularly and I can't go buying salt licks to dip in my coffee, but I'm feeling pretty good about things.  Now I just have to keep up on the working out and avoiding the sodium bomb lunches at Uwajimaya....and losing about another 30 pounds.