Category Archives: Sickness & Health

Know Thyself: Monitoring Blood Pressure

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This was a discussion yesterday on Twitter, after Stephen posted his blood pressure [presumably from a checkup], and then a variety of us were discussing blood pressure and such. For those who don’t know, Mom had a severe stroke in 2000; we are blessed to still have her with us. The last couple of years, I’ve been cognizant of my blood pressure and working to reduce it with medication and lifestyle changes. [The former has had far better effect, but I'm working on the latter.]

I use an Omron automatic blood pressure monitor to check mine, and I try to measure it twice a day: in the morning after I awaken, and sometime after dinner. I keep my unit near my desk, and I will wait until I have been seated at my desk for ten to fifteen minutes before I break out the cuff. [I've been out here at my desk for about a half-hour after waking up, reading email and generally plugging back into the Internet.] The Omron has a memory for logging, but I choose to use my iPhone for the logging. I use IncisiveGeek’s BP Tracker, available for $1.99 in the App Store. It’s handy, and I can snag readings when I’m at the doctor’s office, too. In fact, I usually get appreciative looks from the nurse when I ask, “Hey, what was my BP and pulse rate?” and start tapping it into the screen.

For those who are curious, which includes my mother … since 24 Oct, when I started using this app, I’m running 128/75 on average. A little higher than I’d like, but given how crappy work has been of late, I’ll take it.

As a sidenote: right around the first of the year, I decided to hit Starbucks up early in the evening [don't ask why; I don't have a good answer]. That was a terrible choice for me, personally—my systolic spiked 25% because of the espresso, and my diastolic was up 30%. Standard levels of caffeine are generally not dangerous for me, but … whatever turbo fuel was in that cup made me feel just horrible. When I was feeling that bad, I took the reading, confirming that my BP spiking is why I felt like crap. Blood pressure is called the silent killer, but it’s really not that hard to listen to your body, folks.

[Note: this is not to say that Starbucks is bad for you, or that they were trying to kill me with that peppermint mocha. It's just that I clearly have a sensitivity to espresso now that I have largely weaned myself from caffeine. Knowing what doesn't work for your body is as important as knowing what does work for it.]

Closing the Windows

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Every autumn at my house, there are two great days for me:

  1. The day I can turn off my air conditioner, open up my windows, and let Nature cool the house. Admittedly, I do this as early as I can, and there are days when it hits 30C upstairs during the day, but I can live with that to not run my A/C.
  2. The day I have to close my windows because it’s too cold outside to leave them open at night, but yet not too warm during the day that my house gets hot if they stay shut.

Today is that second day. In case you’re wondering, yes, I do eventually turn on the heat pump, but only when it gets below 5C outside or so. My house holds heat pretty well, and so do I; it’s only when pipes are ready to freeze that I’ll fire up the heat, and even then I only keep it around 15C downstairs; it’ll be near enough to 20C upstairs to be comfortable. It helps that my neighbors on both sides really like to run their heat up high, as I get some of their residual heat through the common walls between our townhouses.

A Brief Vacation Update

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So, let’s see … the ear infection killed my Friday, so I didn’t go to visit my parents over the weekend as expected. Presumably, I was going to work. But no. I felt like crap all weekend. I went in to the office to get my work laptop around 0630 yesterday, came home, went back to sleep, got up in time to go to Hooters for my boss’s birthday lunch [it's his wife's idea; honest], came home, went back to sleep [for as much as I hate to sleep, I love to sleep when on vacation], and when I considered working last night, my ear got to acting up again. Gah.

I haven’t done diddly crap today, other than canceling my reservations for the chalet. I figured it was 50-50 that I’d still feel like dogmeat, and I didn’t want to be spending $200+ to feel like dogmeat in Guntersville when I could feel like dogmeat in Madison.

At some point, I still have to do some work. Oh, and my count for work phone calls this week is already at five. I have probably three or four hours’ worth of work to do, and then I can forget about work [yeah, right] for the rest of the week.

So what am I doing? Finalizing plans for the long-overdue desk-building in the loft [ready to be doing layout later this week ... am probably putting the chalet money towards prototyping], sleeping, and generally not saying a word. This probably surprises some people who know the gregarious, outgoing, extroverted me, but when I’m alone, I go into complete hermit mode. [This surprises exactly none of the people that have ever lived with me, however.] Also, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about random things, and that’s good. This is, functionally, a week-long passive soak. Intuitively, companies understand this, and that’s why I’m getting paid to sit on my ass right now.

I should’ve known better than to make any damn plans for my vacation. My plans never survive contact with the enemy. :casts an eye towards the motto of this Weblog’s jokey name: