Thank God It's Friday: Thank God for massages

Ah, today was the one day a year where as part of my employer/insurance sponsored "Health and Wellness Event" I get to enjoy a 10-minute chair massage. I will admit that I found it quite relaxing and it was a shame I had to come back upstairs and work. But, I'm still relaxed! So, today I thank God for massages!

Thank God It's Friday: Thank God for "High Normal"

Today, it's Friday again. I haven't had a TGIF post in a couple of weeks. I certainly am thankful, but I just haven't expressed it here...

My wife and I are in the homestudy phase of preparing to adopt a child. In fact, all of the paperwork that needs to come from us for the homestudy has been submitted. We're still waiting on a couple of other pieces to make it back to the agency, but that's not what I'm rambling about today...

One of the things that I had to do for the homestudy was go to the doctor. Except for when I broke my ankle two summers ago, I haven't been to see the doctor in a long time. So, I went. One of the nurses took my blood pressure. As she took the reading, she had kind of an "oh my, this is bad" expression on her face. In fact, they took my blood pressure several times before I left the office trying to rule out "white coat hypertension" or as I kind of thought of it "I haven't been to the doctor in forever and being here just makes by blood pressure go sky high" hypertension. So, obviously my blood pressure is high and I'm given instruction to check it a couple of times a week, eat better, excercise more, so on and so forth, and come back in a month.

A few days later, I'm at Costco and I check it. Yup, it's high. Since I've got time to kill (we were getting two new tires on the van, why oh why didn't we bring both cars?????), I go ahead and buy a home blood pressure monitor. On the side of the screen, the monitor has a four bar scale for dummies to read their blood pressure (it also has the more meaningful numbers too).

• one bar = normal
• two bars = high normal
• three bars = stage 1 hypertension
• four bars = state 2 hypertension

After seeing the four-bar scale, I'm guessing that when I was in the doctor's office, I was probably at five bars or "if we prick you, your blood will spurt out and hit the wall on the opposite side of the exam room, possibly even busting a hole in the wall as it hits hypertension." Since they didn't tell me what the actual numbers were I can only guess.

So, in the weeks since, I've been doing lots of things to help bring my blood pressure down, including

• trying to eat better
• exercising more
• trying not to watch too many innings of the Phillies clobbering the Nationals (admittedly, the Phillies only two losses have been at the hands of the Nationals, "Gentlemen Zim" or "Franchise" really came through last night)
• hardly watching any of the Baltimore ANGELOSers
• taking my vitamins and supplements

Well, in that stretch I've seen a lot of three bars and a fair number of four bars too. After my doctors visit this week, I've started taking a fine product of Novartis pharmaceuticals. Guess what, this morning when I sat down to check my blood pressure, it was only in the two bar range. OK, it was at the high end of the two bar range, but nevertheless it was in the two bar range. It's probably the effect of the bp drug although I am persuaded it's also due to Ryan Zimmerman's two run pinch hit homer last night. It's still high, but it's being coming down. I'm not dead yet, in fact, I feel like taking a walk. So today, I thank God for "High Normal."