No pressure then

I remember the days when, if anything, my blood pressure was slightly on the low side. Those days of doing the City to Surf, and even a half-marathon once. You knew you were a bit BP-challenged directly after leaping up from a sitting position or leaping out of bed (gosh, that was a long time ago) and everything would sort of go a bit black and white for a second or two and you would enter another dimension... then along the way I turned into a hyped-up stressed-out attitudinal bitch. Around the same time as turning 40? Nooooo. Come on.

Lots of things jip me these days. I can get stressed about anything, including having my blood pressure read, with the predictable result that you can't get a decent reading short of knocking me out, and even then I'll probably be having murderous thoughts about you in my unconscious dreams. They call this annoying little syndrome 'white coat hypertension'. It's true. I can't go past a hospital without feelings of dread and doom and depression, and going inside one involves a lot of deep breathing. Same for doctors' surgeries, even if I've only gone inside to get out of the rain. I go into fight or flight mode, more deep breathing. My lungs are probably in great shape, but I might have to take some extra responsibility for global warming.

The solution to this is something called the 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitor, the idea being that you wear it for 24 hours while having a normal life(?) and it proves, with a bit of luck, that you are perfectly normal BP-wise. You have to wear a belt round your middle to which you clip the device that collects the data. From this device that looks exactly like a very early Sony Walkman prototype, a long thin rubbery snaky thing coils alarmingly out of control until it connects with the cuff that you have to keep around your (usually left) arm. The cold snaky slithery thing is optimistically attached somewhere around your shoulder blades with sticky tape that you know will have detached itself by the time you've found the car again. The device inflates the cuff every half hour and takes a reading, during which time it's advisable to keep verrrry still, because if you don't the cuff will just grip ever tighter as if to say "Oy! Are you paying attention chum?". Mind you, it BLOODY HURTS anyway, even if you are behaving yourself. It is like someone has tied a piece of wire around your arteries, giving stressy people like me an extra reason to stress (this time about possible frost bite) - I'm supposed to get a normal reading from this??

This is how it goes... whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRR ow ow ow kerthuk...kerthuk...kerthuk (be still my pounding heart) kerthuk... ssssssssssssssssss. Huge relief that's over for another half hour.

You get kind of used to it though. I went to work as usual with the first one I had fitted. No problemo! Except for that bit in the afternoon meeting, with 20 people sitting around the boardroom table, and you just know that there's going to be a lull in the proceedings, that hush that sometimes falls, when angels are said to be passing overhead, and into the reverent silence... whirrrrrRRRRRRR...

"Coffee anyone?"

Yes, you get used to it. Even though the cuff is always slightly loose and threatening to slide off altogether, with the result that you tend to stagger around Boris Karloff-like with your arm held out in front of you. And forget taking a shower. The amazing thing is that I've ever managed to get any sleep. After 10pm it reverts to taking a reading once an hour until 6am. And you do sleep. Gosh! I'm an insomniac at the best of times, so I don't understand how that works. (Maybe I should wear one more often.)

It's interesting reading the results afterwards and seeing where the spikes occur. "Ah yes, that's the reading when my mobile kept telling me my message could be incorrect and then promptly deleted it. It was rather a long message I had just laboriously texted". One morning, just before I was due to drop the thing back at the surgery, I asked my long-suffering partner to help me dress. The thing is, you can't remove the snaky slithery thing from the data box in case you lose the data. I thought this was obvious, but to make things easier for me, the Boy Wonder decided to detach it. OhmyGODwhathaveyoudonequickquickyouidiotthedatasRUINEDI'llhavetodoitallagain...

WhirrrrrrRRRRRRR...

Actually, it was fine. Never a blip. Except for the interesting spike in the reading, of course.