What do we do when something makes our blood pressure go dangerously up ah?
FOR 10 years or more, it tried to get its wicked hands on me. In the newly born morning, in the sultry afternoon and during the cool twilight.
The pressure was intense, from the moment I awakened to the time I retired. Like a shadow it was, like a blood-curdling wraith it felt.
No doubt it was dangerous, threatening to explode my blood vessels. So deadly that I took all precautions imaginable to ward it off.
I did my best. Or so I thought. All manner of defences did I put up to ease the terror of my blood. But it, the wraith that it is, slipped through all of them. It overcame my toughest efforts and with a final wail of triumph possessed me in March.
Thus my battle is over. Or it has just really just begun.
Now it has a hold on me for life. 160-100. Alas.
Its name. Hypertension.
Before this, only others had this condition. Friends and acquaintances. Strangers and relatives. Of the former, I had visited several. A few were in hospital, many were at home.
Stroke kept them in hospital before they left the “surly bonds of Earth”. Medication helped the others at home to live a “normal life”.
I didn’t visit Papa though. I lived with him for just under one score year instead. He had hypertension, but he didn’t take his meds regularly, Mummy would later tell us.
We kids didn’t know what hypertension was those days in the 1980s. Death and disease did not feature much in family conversations. Not until Papa suffered a massive stroke on a hunting trip in the morning. And faded from life into the darkness of night.
Thirty years later, these conversations are more pronounced. Both at home and in the public space. There’s a good reason for this.
According to the National Health Morbidity Survey in 2019, the “overall prevalence of hypertension among adults aged 18 years and above… was 30 per cent”. It also said that a big number
of people don’t even know they have elevated blood pressure.
It’s the same with Covid-19, right? Many people are asymptomatic; they do not know they harbour the virus. This may lead them to dangerous paths.
Hypertension’s path, too, can lead to a whole lot of dreadful dreams and awful angst about a heart attack, stroke and kidney disease.
But the fact is, it’s not a death sentence lah. There is absolutely no reason to have morbid
thoughts. That’s what my amiable doctor soothingly says. “It’s still very much up to you. Do what is necessary to manage it, to keep it from swinging back and forth.”
That’s what I thought I did. Careful with the weight, cautious with the food, crammed with exercise and always combative with cigarette smokers.
“Don’t look back on what could have been done. The body is ageing anyway,” says another doctorfriend though. Honest advice.
If the next 10 years are going to mean anything, it’s best, as one of my favourite writers puts it, to “get into the habit of looking for the silver lining of the cloud… continue to look at it, rather than at the leaden grey in the middle”.
That applies to anyone with any condition. Don’t let the wicked hands deceive you and make you see and feel anything less yah.