Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Beating High Blood Pressure


Controlling Your blood Pressure

Knowing and controlling your blood pressure is very important, it can be the difference between you having a stroke, a heart attack or even dying. The only true way to know if you have high blood pressure or not is to be seen by a doctor.

There’s a reason they call high blood pressure the silent killer, because most people don't know they have it. Let me tell you my story and how close I came to being a statistic.

I am not in the worst physical shape I am former football player so I still carry around a lot of muscle and this is going to hurt me to have to say, but I also carry around a little fat.

Okay maybe more then a little, I guess the point I’m trying to make is I’m like a lot of you not in the worse or best shape of my life. Being married to a great cook for twelve years will do that to you .

Anyway we have a beautiful eleven year old son and for the most part life was good, that was until I ended up spending three nights in the hospital because of my blood pressure.

Now before I go any farther I should tell you that I have already been check for high blood pressure and was currently on blood pressure medicine. I’ll admit I wasn’t as strict with my diet as maybe I should have been, but for the most part I was pretty good about it.

I had no idea my blood pressure had risen as high s it had. I was taking my medicine every day like I was supposed to and I had all but taken salt out of my diet. I didn’t have any of the signs I was getting before I was on medicine, I wasn’t getting blinding headaches which is often a sign that your blood pressure may be dangerously high.

The only thing that was bothering me was my vision In my left eye was a little blurry(The reason I went to the doctor in the first place), blurry vision is also a sign of dangerously high blood pressure. I didn’t know it at the time.

Unbelievable I waited two weeks before I finally went to the doctor, mind you the eye had begun to get better. I figured in time my vision would fully return to normal, but after two weeks it didn’t so my wife convinced me to go to the doctor and have it looked at. To may surprise my eye was the least of my problems.

After a short wait in the emergency (All day), I finally got to see a doctor. Now as I said I am already on high blood pressure medicine so I am expecting an eye exam, some eye drops and that’s it.

To my surprise, my blood pressure was so high that I had to spending three days in the hospital, and the reason my left eye had gone blurry was because I had suffer a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or a mini stroke and had not even known it.

I was stunned, it turned out to be a real wake up call for me. I am fine now in case any of you were wondering, and my vision is pretty much back to normal ,but I am lucky things could have been a lot worst.

If you’re having really bad headaches or dizziness spells, blurred vision, nausea or vomiting you should go and get checked out by your doctor, these could be warning signs . It’s not worth having a major stroke or worst dying.

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