Feint of Heart

Last week could have been worse.

Not only was I threatened over a silly article by a silly person, I was battling a problem with my blood pressure.

The numbers were running very high - stroke level high, actually. My doctor was telling me to take half of this pill or that to try to bring it down. I didn't know whether to exercise or go to bed.

Would that very last Baked Lays Potato Chip be the thing that threw me over the edge? I wondered.

And of course, things like having to phone the police to report said threatening phone call only upped my blood pressure. It certainly did nothing to ease it.

Finally, I saw my doctor on Thursday. She detected a new heart murmur. She's been listening to my heart for over 15 years so surely she would have heard it before were it not new.

She also said she heard a carotid bruit, which is a vascular sound over the carotid artery in the neck.

This is new, as well.

Add this to the pain in my calf that seems to be varicose veins, and it's starting to look like I have some kind of heart issue. Plaque buildup, probably. Too bad I can't brush my veins out like I do my teeth. 

Isn't learning that you are having heart problems just what one wants to hear to end out the week?

My doctor did not do bloodwork as I have terrible veins and the nurse that can easily do that was not in the office. She made a referral to a cardiologist but warned me not to expect to hear from the facility any time soon. Apparently, the days of making a referral and then seeing the expert with a few weeks are long gone. She said it may be months before I see a cardiologist, "but you'll be ok," adding that if she were really concerned, she would have sent me on to the emergency room.

In the meantime, she doubled one of my medicines, and the blood pressure numbers are lower now. Not great, but better than they were, and enough that I feel I have some breathing room.

Her notes on my chart indicate she is concerned about aortic stenosis. Aortic stenosis (AS or AoS) is the narrowing of the exit of the left ventricle of the heart (where the aorta begins).

However, I do not have the symptoms of this, which include loss of consciousness, shortness of breath, and chest pain. (Yes, I looked it up. Wouldn't you?) I have two out of 5 risk factors - high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and my cholesterol, while not great, is not running at really high levels. In fact, it was in the normal range 30 years ago when a doctor first checked it. 

I'm one of those people who think the numbers for cholesterol lower so the pharmaceutical companies can sell more drugs (I think the same thing about "A1C," which no one ever heard of until there was a drug available to "fix" it.). 

Cholesterol medicine did not agree with me when I tried it some years ago. I had cognitive issues with it and at one point could barely put two sentences together. That cleared up as soon as I stopped the medication. No one in my family tolerates cholesterol medication well, and since it seems to be a familial problem, I doubt seriously that there is little to be done about it.

My doctor told me once when I said something about being concerned about dementia since one of my medications is a suspect for that, that I shouldn't worry. "You'll die of a heart attack long before you get dementia," she said.

Comforting, eh?