Monday, January 30, 2006

apparently I have low blood pressure

Yesterday was really quite scary, not just because of my catastrophic skiing experience, but because of what came after. Following the skiing debacle, I felt healthy enough to take the trolleybus to the AH to blog about the event and to check my email. I'd been here for about two hours when I started to get a headache. This is pretty common for me, but I figured I should go home and lie down. On the bus ride home, I began to feel sick, and barely made it through the door before vomiting. I won't go into all of the disgusting details, but suffice it to say that for a period of about five hours I had an excruciating headache (not a migraine, but the same kind of pain) and and inability to keep anything down. I was also going back and forth between swealtering hot-flashes and chills. Nina M., who has high blood pressure, and who is constantly monitoring it, took out her BP cuff and checked my blood pressure. It was so low that she decided to call "skoro pomoch" ("quick help"), the Russian equivalent of 911. The woman who arrived from quick help was neither quick nor helpful, and while she confirmed that I did indeed have low blood-pressure, she said I wasn't dying and seemed put out that we'd bothered her. Nina M. says that I need to eat lots of chocolate and drink lots of coffee, so as to raise my blood pressure (twist my arm!). This is all kind of scary. I felt fine when I woke up this morning, and I hope it lasts... [WebMD about low blood pressure]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Low pressure is mainly caused by weather changes. There are special vitamins to raise it to feel fine, as well as some food prescriptions such as liver, black caviar, raisin, plum etc. ;)