Cold weather has finally settled in, signaling the arrival of winter. At least that’s the way it is for now. Next week we may be back up to summer, or at least late spring, temperatures, but at the moment it feels like winter outside. That prompted me to do a thorough review of my daily regimen of pills. Because for most of my life I didn’t have any major health issues and got lulled into a false sense of complacency, I never got into the habit of taking any drug regularly. Every once in a while I’d buy a bottle of multivitamins and take one a day for a week or two I’d miss a day. Usually it seemed like I’d remember on my way to work that I’d forgotten to take my morning pill and I’d figure the effects, whatever they were, would last another twenty-four hours, and that I could return to the routine the next day. Of course by the time the next day rolled around the routine had been broken, my mind was already on other things, and the bottle would languish in its spot in the corner of the kitchen counter. Sometimes I’d remember it and pick up the habit again, but I couldn’t stick to it and a ninety-day supply of vitamins would sometimes last more than a year.
Now that I’m older and even though cancer is a good decade behind me—hopefully I’m not tempting fate by saying that—I can’t afford to be so casual about my pill-taking. On the bright side I still don’t have to take a lot of medications. Not currently, anyway. I’m getting older all the time and my pill intake may have to rise at some point so it was good that, following my time in treatment, I forced myself to develop a drug habit. After cancer I developed high blood pressure. Actually during cancer I had high blood pressure and I remember one nurse commenting on it and asking me, “Do you have anything that’s making you feel stressed right now?” And I asked, “You mean other than cancer?”
After chemotherapy I had to have major surgery and the high blood pressure continued for months after that so I got to see a cardiologist who explained that it was likely that during that surgery part of one of my kidneys might have been damaged and that it was dying. She added, “It’s not quite dead,” and, you know, when a doctor quotes Monty Python at you it either means the situation isn’t anything to worry about and we can joke about it or it’s so bad that we have to joke about it to relieve some of the tension. In this case it was the former, as she went on to explain that while it was likely only a small part of the kidney it was probably stimulating the adrenal gland. She prescribed some blood pressure medication and it worked.
A few months later I went back to her for a follow-up and asked if there would be a point when the damaged part of my kidney would stop affecting the adrenal gland. She said yes and, thinking about how I am with pills, I asked if I could stop taking the medication.
“At your age,” she said, “anything that keeps your blood pressure low is a good thing.”
Thanks, doc, for reminding me I’m constantly getting older—my age and my blood pressure both went up while I was thinking about that but, thanks to the pills, one of them came down.
I cant relate, Chris, and after I finish commenting on your blog today I have to put my pills for the week in my handy-dandy pill case. I’m not dead yet.
I hope I could help lower your blood pressure, and that you’re lucky enough to also have a doctor who quotes Monty Python. Maybe Dr. Salem doesn’t but I bet he at least gets your jokes.