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i did not enjoy that!
So, fun: My blood pressure has always been a little interesting. It tends to be elevated, though not what you'd actually call high, even when I am otherwise generally in good health etc. (and at a "healthier" weight than I am now). There's family history. It's a thing. I guess the good news is that when I was pregnant, my slightly-higher-than-they'd-like blood pressure was in no way a sign of eclampsia, pre- or otherwise, because it had always been that way; it wasn't the baby doing it to me.
Last week I went to the dentist, and they took my BP before my cleaning, for some reason. (They've done this before, but not every time, so I don't know what the deal is there.) It was alarmingly high, but they were using a wrist cuff that was, like, crooked and unreliable, so they did it again with a normal upper arm cuff—but that was a little too small, and they did it over my sleeve, and ultimately the reading was still high and I said yeah okay I'll measure again at home before I invite my GP to get worried about it, let's do these teeth.
This morning in the shower I was seeing stars out of the side of my left eye. It was very surprising and distracting; as I was washing my hair I was thinking, wow, good thing I don't have to go anywhere today, because this would be a major bummer if I were trying to drive a car. Definitely something sparkly and invasive using up quite a lot of my peripheral vision. I've heard people talk about migraine auras, and I thought that sounds the most like what this seemed to be, but I've never had an aura before, and I felt fine, no headache or any of my own other usual migraine symptoms. Very strange.
So when I got downstairs I told Himself this had happened, because it was so new and weird, and I sat down and took my blood pressure, because it seemed like a good idea to do so (having promised the dental assistant that I would . . . last week), and I got 140/104, which of course I didn't like at all. In my tends-to-be-on-the-elevated-side life I have not had three-digit numbers on the bottom. Sigh. So I dropped a note to my GP to say okay this happened: dentist didn't like it last week, stars in my eye this morning, high BP, guess my family history is overwhelming my lifestyle efforts, I'm ready to talk about a pharmaceutical solution. And then I went to my desk to work.
And inside an hour, conveniently while Himself was out taking the prince to school, I began to feel terrible. Sinus headache, really painfully throbbing around my right eye, plus a little stopping in my ear and queasiness bad enough that it was a real effort to bring myself to take ibuprofen. But I did: 600mg Advil, plus a couple of Mucinex and a hit of Afrin in each nostril because those symptoms are more head-coldy than migrainey and opening the airways is good. And I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands, which helped a bit in a way that is more migrainey—and I could again see something flashing at the extreme left edge of my vision. So I went to lie down.
Himself was back from the school run by then, and I texted him that I wasn't feeling great; of course he said "define 'not great,' please," and when I said "can you come up and talk to me" he came pretty quickly, and he googled "heart attack symptoms in women" and even his catastrophizing self was reassured that even interpreting everything I was feeling as negatively as possible, it didn't seem like that was what was happening to me. And I didn't want to sit up, but I could see him clearly and was speaking normally, so I wasn't having a stroke. It seems to have been an unusually severe migraine that came on fast, not helped by the ever-present building work being done in our neighborhood (maybe a circular saw in continuous use today? something noisy and awful), and once he determined he didn't need to call me an ambulance he shut the door and I lay there in the dark room for an hour and a half until I became aware I no longer wanted to throw up (which I haven't actually done since about 1991, no matter how sick I've been with e.g. nasty food poisoning, and I'm here to tell you that wanting to throw up and not being able to is a wretched way to feel).
I'm doing better now, breathing clearly and not nauseated and sitting up straight and looking at my computer screen in a room with the light on—but that sucked and I'm not at all sorry I had already written to my doctor this morning, because damn.
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I find that sitting quietly and doing rounds of 4-7-8 breathing can lower BP, both during an attack and as a "lifestyle practice".
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