Good Hospital Tale (so you know the ending, but it takes a while)

I would like if whoever tagged the thread ossobuco or jo would delete one or both of those as a favor, so I can add vasodepressive syncope, the eventual diagnosis, to the tags - so other people dealing with this stuff that I'm starting to call fainting goat syndrome can find the thread via google. Or maybe someone else besides me can add vasodepressive syncope. I could only add one, and it was a toss up to me to make it lisinopril or the syncope.

It had a lot of medical types consternated for a while. Turns out, from my reading so far, that the fainting isn't all that bad in itself, typically being short* - it's what might happen when you go boom fast that can be the worry.

Now I'm keeping a log of blood pressures over the hours since this new med is a real piece of work. I might get to like it but it has certain attributes that are very off putting at first.

* two separate docs didn't believe me that the blackout was short, and expressed that disbelief in their notes - but I remember falling after I whacked my forehead. The eventual diagnosis fits with it being short. And the cardiologist had the goods when they ran that tilt test.

(My internist, bless her heart, copied test results for me.)

To explain, the med does raise pressure, but it also lowers pressure. Some of this has to do with if you are supine, but, in my notes re me and the pressures up until now, not all so much. It is crazy making, all over the place, but so far, all of that is within normal range.
Caramba. Maybe this wacky drug is stabilizing in its mode.

Yes,that's why we call it 'the present.'

So glad to hear that it all turned out all right in the end and that you're OK. Sincerely.

But, do me a favor, Osso: don't take up trying to write any comedy skits. You'd never get to the punch-line.

I can't tell jokes either..


Actually, I do do punchlines sometimes, usually with out a lead in. They're just rather dry.

Jokes! Don't make me laugh! I remember the punchlines (sometimes) but never the jokes!

Anyway, I quite enjoyed your cliffhanger - made a change!

Still taking my pressures, recording them, and noting when I take the pill - and glad I am. Also following pulse info. Whacko, in that they keep going back and forth in agitation but never terrible yet, in either direction, though pushing it. Also, they don't uniformly go back and forth together.

I saw my primary doctor today, the woman who runs a local clinic. I've long liked her, she does a good job handling all she does. The hospital made the appointment but hadn't sent her my chart, so she knew nada when I showed up. Long story, the senior bus went to the wrong place, and wouldn't come back for me and I had to ask Diane if she could take me, she could but we'd be late. Called Clinic, ok. So I showed up crabby. And it turned out that they were putting all their records online so I had to fill out a million more papers of my med history again. Sparks coming out my ears.

Anyway, when I got to see the doctor, in my purse I had a copies of what the internist hospitalist person gave me from my chart, plus the small amount of discharge info, the info sheet (caramba) that comes with the med, my blood pressure readings at home for about nine days (let's say at least a hundred, more like 150, all together in the search for a pattern/patterns by me), my health care wishes and people to call, revisited. Oh, and requests for referrals to several clinics at UNM.

Her reaction was the same as my first, re the med, it sends your blood pressure up??????? So I told her that I and then the pharmacist I asked to talk to had the same question, where was something to send it down?, and I'd gotten home and called cardiology and eventually been told, yes, take it (and shut up). No, not the shut up part, but the cardiologist was confident. It's looking like the cardiologist was right and the brochure/whatever you call it doesn't adequately describe the action of the drug.
She understood, and of course ordered the whole hospital chart soonist.

She emailed the referrals to the places I asked (audiology, dental, dermo).
And then a guy took out my stitches, late to come out but this was the first they could see me, the hospital setting the appointment. To occupy me lest I be focused on pain (it wasn't at all bad), he asked what was my favorite book and I told him Primo Levi's Reawakening, and he said he was reading Moby Dick, was at page 500 something and still hadn't met the whale, but loved the book. Turns out he has an interesting education - and he's good with patients. I think he's just starting med school at an older age.
Doctor happy with the look of my curved Y scar area progress.

Then I treated Diane to what turned out to not be a great lunch.
But now we don't have to go back there again.

Seems that all's well, or nearly so. Good deal.

BP normally fluctuates throughout the course of the day, for a variety of reasons.

If your doctor thinks it necessary, or could be helpful, you could wear a 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitor, which takes a reading automatically every 20-30 minutes, regardless of what you are doing, including when you are at sleep. That's better than the sort of measurements you are doing on yourself, because, for one thing, you can't measure your BP during sleep. It measures the heart rate as well each time it takes a BP reading.

It may be that a hospital near you loans the ambulatory BP monitor out, as they do with Holter monitors (ambulatory 24 hour EKG monitors), and then they analyze the 24 hour reading for you. I remember that my mother once needed the 24 hour BP monitor, when her BP was bouncing all over the place, and I think we got hers from a private clinic rather than a hospital. You only need to wear it for 24 hours. The constant inflating of the BP cuff every 20 minutes or so can be a little annoying, but my mother really didn't complain about it. And it's only for one day.

It may be that you no longer need medication for high BP, but you need your new med to keep your BP from going too low. A 24 hour BP measurement might help to determine that.

Just a thought.

Glad that things seem to be levelling out on the blood pressure front - and that your wound is healing okay. Sorry about all the form filling you had to put up with - must have been pretty annoying!

This is a different situation with an unusual med that is rarely prescribed. I am monitoring voluntarily so I can fully understand it and I'm now trusting the cardiologist's recommendations for pill taking timing. I'll be getting back to normal mildly watchful mode in the next few days.

To recap, I do have high blood pressure sans pills at all, and I have had fainting episodes from another pill than this one three times in five years because that pill sent the pressure too low. This pill remedies that, but also doesn't send it too high if I take it in the way the cardio prescribed. That is what was hard to understand in the brochure that came with the pill, and neither the pharmacist nor my generalist primary doc understood it either. I have been monitoring to see it in action.

I was going to be set up with a home monitor for 30 days if the last test in the hospital hadn't shown what was going on with me - but it did.

I got some Katy photos from the good woman at Walgreens today, but I also talked with the pharmacist I had talked with about ten days ago, about how this stuff works. He was going off the available info. This is not your common drug.

He was surprised that if I took it when the bp was 147 that it would go down, since it is described as going up. Which freaked me in the first place, even before the pharmacist, and with him, and later, my generalist doctor.

Me, I was crapshooting on it, I took the pill, since the cardiologist said so. It did go down, again and again, several days now.. bouncy bouncy.

None of the three of us gathered that from the scaryshit brochure.

All three of us wondered how to get the bp down.
But the drug does.
Somehow, though known entirely, and I do mean entirely, for bringing it up.

We had all thought there must be some second drug.
No.

I think I'll listen to mr. don't ask me questions I'm too busy.

Nuts, I've relaxed too much. I still need to annotate this stuff.

Not like this it doesn't.
But thanks.

Also, I spent five days not being able to move from the monitoring. There was a room with people monitoring me 24/7

You are kidding that I might want to monitor now when they don't think so.
More likely you didn't read up and are advising me off the cuff, as in be a good girl.

I've annotated my pressures and my pulses, which interested me as they seem crazy. About ten days worth now.

I now get them, gave a copy to my primary clinic person. Will give a copy to my pharmacist (he had no idea the drug could make pressure decrease, was originally wary of the drug - for good reason, the brochure - and was part of my calling the cardiology people). I would have anyway, but his concern was a help.

I think she's just trying to be helpful, offering suggestions, and what not.

I was talking about me in the hospital and stuff around all that.

I admit to freaking multiple times.

You know me, sort of loosy goosey

But still.

That was quite a five days.

Adds, Firefly knows I like her, the brat.