Can you FEEL high blood pressure?

I was with Gram today and hers was soaring (we took it four times while I was there)

She was feeling lightheaded and disconnected, and was kind of clumsy.

Yikes! I hope she's ok. Did the pressure come down? Did you call the doc?

I can only feel low bp...

she was better before I left, and has relaxed a bit.

(she has an unexpected visitor coming tomorrow for a stay-over and is fretting I think)

she was not scary high, just rather up for her. (we watch it always, and she is the healthier of the pair of us)

Kris, I know that when my wife (who has varying degrees of high blood pressure) feels a lot of stress, she gets flushed in the face, blood pumping faster, and gets headaches. Also, being a bit unsteady on her feet.

Lying down helps to lower the pressure, to some degree, depending on how bad one has it.

G'day K

There may be no symptoms at all of elevated blood pressure.

Or...you may have some and not recognise them.

Swollen feet for no good reason; headaches, dizziness, a squillion other things may be early symptoms.

I suffered terrible migraines for many years until they discovered I had high blood pressure. Having been put on a course of medication (for the rest of one's life) I have not had a migraine since and that was 40 years ago.

Excellent question, but I don't think you receive any good answers.

As usual you're talking crap!

I've had periods of anxiety when my blood pressure would be very high. I could always tell because my upper arms would start to tingle. Then the sensation would grow until it felt like my arms were going to explode...just like when they take your blood pressure. My doctor said that was an unusual symptom, but that people often feel the pressure wherever they tend to carry tension. For me, it's my arms.

Kris, short answer from personal experience: no, not always. I've been on the lower end of having high blood pressure for years and never felt anything. Finally gopt put on medication last year, but still don't really feel anything identifiable. If you're wondering if you have it, I think I've seen a testing machine at the Osco in Porter Square. I have a battery operated home tester I'll bring to the next Boston a2k gathering, and we can all sit around and test each other's BP--talk about a unique party game.

Ive had BP issues for about 10 years before we got it under control. It is a silent killer. I had no appreciable early symptom package to speak of. EVerything I had could be considered autocorrelation and not part of the BP problem/ When BP is high and unchecked for many years , it is like a causitive thing that helps to make your blood vessels less pliable and your heart work harder (In between beats the heart is resting, and when the systolic/diastolic numbers are too close,(no matter how "low" you may think your BP is) your heart aint resting, its working through "its break time").
So, all the factors that become serious, atthrysclerosis, heart failure, kidney problems, strokes , etc are all a consequence of your vascular system being beaten witha sledge hammer and eroding your vascular and cardiac system after years of BP. Its lkike a piping system that gets no maintenance . Over time the negative effects of chemical erosion and physical breakdowns of the pipes just catch up . The big BP study that went on in Framingham MAss years ago let us understand how the interrelationships of caused ailments were related to BP and , if left untreated , what could happen.
The fact that there are usually no sympoms until its later in the game( like one poster talked about swollen feet--this usually only occures AFTER some damage to the heart has occured, Edema is a mid time symptom of initializing heart failure).

Most of the symptoms that people mentioned (with the exception of headaches which are an early disease symptom due to non dilating vessels in the skull surface), almost all symptoms dont start appearing until some damage has been done, otherwise they are just coincidental symptoms that have little to do with the underlying disease.

There are some newer studies that have taken off from Framingham. Theres a study on the benefits (or not) of a mediterranean diet on BP(LYONS diet), theres a study of ethnographic factors on BP by looking at several populations of Slavic, Irish, and AMerican Indian (I thinkthat this study is waaay too optimistic and has not considered all the variables so Im not holding out any positive net results).
These and many more studies are attempting to look at the relationships of early life anomalies and chronic e care for cardiac related symptomology (My favorite is the study on th relationhip of diabetes and cardiac stress).
Well, you asked, and any of us who are BP care patients have years of experience and some knowledge that we pump out of our medical mechanics .

Medicine is looking at the closer values of systolic.diastolic numbers rather than just the highness and lowness of these numbers. Its possible to have BP problems when you have like 1 112 .80 BP because the numbers are too close not just high or low.

Osso talked about feeling low BP, that is a problem with the medicine sometimes. Until I had my meds worked out nicely, I was overmedicating and would black out (positional hyPOtension) whenever I stood up quickly. I was at a baseball game once and stood up to cheer a kid who just drove a home run and I just passed out and hit my head on the bleachers. (very inconvenient when you become the point of interest at a kids baseball game)

Right on, farmer, good explanations there. And yes, for me, the low bp happens (ed) with a change of meds. Scary stuff at the time. Now I recognize it, both the weird feeling/toppling and since it happened with two different med changes.

As others have said, sometimes no symptoms at all, or aren't recognized.

I had high BP for awhile, it presented as a headache that felt like a tight band around my head.

well, it's like a tunnel with a very bright light and I can see my grandpa waving at me and there is really wonderful elevator music and the aroma of toll-house cookies just coming out of the oven. I can make out Omsigdavid just outside the tunnel.

No, that just the pot talking.

Wow, thanks Farmerman! Your post was a very interesting read.

Chai and Dutchy - it's the headache thing that got me thinking. I have something going on. But, it's hard to decscribe. When I climb 2-3 flights of stairs, my head pounds - not with pain, but like a blood pressure beat. Sometimes when I lay down to sleep I feel my pulse in my throat. A couple years ago the NP checked my jugular with her stethoscope and thought it sounded fine.

I was just at the docs because I have started having migraines again. They're absurdly minor though. As a teen I had the whole nine yards with searing pain, tingling fingers, blotchy vision, numbness in my face, sensitivity to glare and vomiting. I was a mess for 1-2 days. Then I had tension headaches in my 20s. Those lasted 2-3 days. During my 30s I was almost entirely headache free.

Now at 40, I have had mild migraines. My sight is slightly blotchy, my head has some lancing pain, but it's not major, glare kills my eyes, and I am nauseous a little. I was worried they might get worse and I knew there'd been advances in treating migraines. He made the comment that blood pressure could be related. He did NOT ask if I was under unusual stress, or what my diet is like.....

Usually, these days, my blood pressure is just at the normal max. (I think it is around 120/70-ish). But, historically, my BP had been quite low.

I'd suggest you go out and buy a good automatic blood pressure monitor.

It's always good to have one of them around in any event.

You don't have to bother with programing it, just take your pressure at various times during the day, and record the date, time and reading.

My doctor told me that if you take your blood pressure first thing when you get up, don't be alarmed if it's elevated. You just went from a prone position, sleeping for hours to standing up and moving around, and your body takes a bit to adjust. Mix up the times you take it, so you can tell if there's a pattern. If you always take it at 5 pm and it's high every time, that may mean your blood pressure is always up that time of day. It might be fine at noon, 8am, 3pm and 9pm.

It's worth the investment, although they are not that expensive.