Too Little, Too Late?

A very lovely 3lb loss this week, definitely in the right direction now!

But is it too little, too late? Well it's never too late as they say, and apparently every little helps! But maybe if I had done a lot more a lot sooner I wouldn't now be back from the GP with a raft of blood tests to be done, and the strong probability of a lifetime of medication for high blood pressure.

The high blood pressure was an accidental finding, although if I'm honest I've been feeling less fit, more tired, maybe even a little breathless on relatively little exercise of late. I put it down to the slight increase in my weight over the summer. I felt as though I'd crossed an invisible line between fit and unfit, that one particular pound gained must be a pound too far. And maybe that is so, and maybe in a few weeks this problem will magically melt away with the pounds.

What happened was this:

I had a crack in my tooth at the start of the summer holidays, and I preferred to wait if I possibly could until Rebecca was back at school before I had the dental work done. This meant I was taking Ibuprofen regularly for some weeks, and eventually I suffered some painful gastric side effects. So I popped off to the doc for a remedy for that, and while I was there she checked my BP. The reading was very high, but at that point she dismissed it as being her "useless machine", prescribed my some meds for my gastric pain and sent me on my way. However, I'm a cardiac nurse with a pretty strong family history of cardiovascular disease, and I wasn't happy to just be fobbed off, so over the last week or so I have been using the Coronary Care equipment to monitor my own BP while I've been at work and readings have without fail been depressingly high.

So I trotted back to the GP with a list of my recent blood pressures this morning and I have to have lots of blood tests, get an eye health check, keep monitoring my BP, and return when the results are back. I can't decide whether it would be better to find something (treatable!) wrong with the blood tests that would explain the BP, or for it to just be one of those things and for the BP to need lifelong treatment. But I know I feel utterly weird about a future that includes me having to say, when asked about my health, "I have hypertension".

Reading that back, it sounds like a cascade of health issues and I sound so unhealthy - I have never been unhealthy and poor health would be a very bad fit on me. I won't stand for it!

But I lost 3lb this week :)