No fairytales - here we go again
My weekend started with me spending 10 hours in the ER of Wake Baptist Hospital on Thursday. I awoke at 6 a.m. with a pounding headache and a racing heart. I checked my blood pressure, and it was elevated to what I was told were stroke levels, based on another healthcare provider during another ER visit a couple of months ago.
Knowing this made my pressure rise all the more.
I popped a blood pressure pill in my mouth and started doing some deep breathing exercises. I prayed, called on Jesus, read Scriptures, called on friends, and was a deep breath away from channeling my inner Tina Turner and chanting nam-myoho-renge-kyo when it finally went down.
But a couple of hours later, the pounding resumed, and the pressure started rising again. I did something I’ve never had to do before: I popped another blood pressure pill in my mouth. Two in one day is a record for me. This time, though, instead of going down, it continued to climb.
Say no more, I was out the door. I checked into the ER at 2:30 p.m. and didn’t leave until 12:30 a.m. I was triaged in under 30 minutes, but the rest of the time, I, like the many others, just sat and waited…and waited…and waited until our names were called.
I got an EKG, a chest X-ray, blood work done and even a urine sample was taken. What I heard next really unsettled me. Are you sitting down? OK, here goes. The doctor walks in and says, “Everything looks good. I’m thinking you have a tension headache, and your blood pressure numbers aren’t really alarming to us.”
“Excuse me, sir, with all due respect, IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, BUT ME,” I think I said to myself but I’m not really sure. “And you could have told me that nine hours ago.”
But what I know I said aloud was this: So, what numbers alarm you?
“When the top number is 180 or above and the bottom number is 120 or higher,” he said.
My numbers were close enough and the most elevated I’ve experienced.
So, then I ask: “Did the high blood pressure cause the tension headache or did the tension headache cause the elevated blood pressure?”
“That’s a good question,” he said. Typically, high blood pressure doesn’t cause headaches unless your numbers are astronomical, but of course, each patient is different. Hello, my name is different.
Eight times out of 10, when my blood pressure is up, I develop a headache. High blood pressure is called the silent killer because people normally don’t have any symptoms. I’ve had family members whose pressure was much higher than mine and they had no clue – and that used to befuddle doctors. I, on the other hand, get a headache with my elevated pressure and that, too, seems to perplex doctors.
My headache was my chief complaint because it is a stroke symptom, but the doctors kept focusing on my heart, which, to me, demonstrated no symptoms of distress. Yet, they put me back on a heart monitor for the next 14 days. The second monitor I’ve had in a year and half.
Just press the button if I feel any symptoms, the instructions read, and record what the symptom is.
Well, I had a lot of fun planned for this weekend: Anita Baker in concert on Saturday night at the Greensboro Coliseum and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) on Sunday at the same place.
As I crooned with my favorite songstress to “Fairy Tales,” “Rapture,” “No One in the World” and “Same Ole Love,” I got a little winded. Was this a result of my heart or my soul? I wasn’t sure, so I pressed the button.
As I rocked it out to TSO’s “Mad Russian’s Christmas” and “Christmas Eve Sarajevo,” did the vibrations felt in my chest come from the reverbs of the electric guitar with the dizzying and electrifying laser light show to boot or was that a palpitation?
I wasn’t sure, sooo, click.
What I do know for sure, is that getting away and lost into the rapture of love was medicine to me. And enjoying my traditional Christmas outing to see TSO signaled the joy that this season brings.
I am grateful to God that all is well and that despite how I feel, nothing alarming shows up on my medical tests. I thank God for all of my prayer warriors, too. You know who you are. When I told the doctor all that I have going on in my life right now - new apartment, new job, graduate school, primary caregiver to my mother - , he said, “know that it’s OK not to be OK.” That got my attention.
I could have cried when I heard those words. A good cry probably would have relieved the tension headache quicker than the $200 Tylenol and Motrin they gave me.
The lesson here is to practice self-care and to take the time to do more of what makes you smile, more of what makes you laugh, more of what makes you dance and what makes you sing like no one is watching at a near sold-out Anita Baker concert.