So today I took a quick journey to the doctors to be told in a total of maybe 3 minutes that I had an upper respiratory infection, and given a prescription. Awesome, so I'll be running by tomorrow right?...Right?
Whatever.
Since I have no new news on exercise, thought I'd take a day to deal with a personal gripe. Blood pressure machines hate me.
Every single time I go to the doctors, I'm saddled up with a blood pressure machine which spits out some (varying) ridiculously high or low number. Since I'm young and look like exactly what I am, a former athlete gone slightly to seed, I often get super confused looks.
"Do you have a history of high/low blood pressure?"
"No."
"Did you drink a lot of caffeine....?"
"No."
"...I'm going to take it manually."
"You do that."
Manually, I'm golden. I'm so golden, I get the same reading every time (114/79). I'm told I have a great heart beat, and they can't figure out why the machine hates me. I'm not worried about having high/low blood pressure, especially since this is the 5th time this has happened, and every time they take it manually I'm fine. This worries me because I don't want to go on some bogus high blood pressure medication and wind up passing out in the middle of a run. This worries me because I hope its not happening to other people who might not be so quick to challenge it.
This also worries me because it makes me question all sorts of heart monitoring equipment. What if I buy a Garmin and the heart rate monitor hates me too?
Maybe its just me.
But if any of you other runners out there ever get a bogus reading off a machine with a vendetta, challenge it. Take the extra 3 minutes to get it checked manually. Fight the power!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Don't know that I've had a problem with blood pressure machines, but cholesterol is another story. The doctor has me on Lipitor. My cholesterol weighed in at 121 (Total) last time. This actually qualifies as low, as in below the normal range. He just says "stay on it, the lower the better".
ReplyDeleteHuh. Now I'm no doctor, but that does seem to be the healthiest perspectives. I googled around and there are some risks associated with overly-low cholesterol levels.
ReplyDeleteThis seemed pretty legit. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholesterol-level/AN01394
I know it annoys doctors when patients google around for info and self-diagnose, etc, but I think a healthy amount of research coupled with doctors visits helps me personally from being overly medicated or mis-diagnosed. For example, all 3 of my spine doctors told me I had sciatica, but not one of them asked me about my piriformis muscle until I brought up the fact that it was hurting too. If I hadn't done my research, I wouldn't have known about it and would have been treating my sciatica wrong, and probably would have wasted hundreds of dollars on painful spine MRI's.
I find the best way to deal with doctors is just to ask lots of questions. WHY is it the lower the better?