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If I Die, Please Post This Posthumously
Yes, I survived.
I’m sitting here in Dunkin’ Donuts, Wednesday morning, with nothing that I feel like writing about, eating a delicious breakfast sandwich that will probably set my cholesterol and blood pressure back six months, and mentally preparing for my MRI, which will take place in about half an hour.
“Mentally preparing,” is the medical term for “working up anxiety that they actually might find something wrong with me, or that something might go wrong, like I’ll accidentally bring a steel nail file into the MRI room and the superconducting magnet will stab me to death with it, which I’m sure you agree would be not very pleasant.”
Why am I getting an MRI? The same reason I got a new BP prescription. (By “BP,” I mean “blood pressure,” and even though it does have to do with oil, not that kind of oil.) I’m getting an MRI, because, over the past several months, I’ve been suffering from headaches, debilitating at times — migraines, we think, probably.
My father also suffered from migraines when he was about my age, and my brother and I were about the same age as my kids are now. Interestingly, as soon as we grew up and moved out of the house, my father’s migraines disappeared. So my headaches may be partially hereditary. The answer, in any case, seems clear: all I have to do is wait until the kids grow up and move out, and then I can have nice things again.
In the meantime, my doctor recommended I try a different blood-pressure medication. I had been taking medication, and my BP was about 140/80, on the border of hypertension. Last week, he gave me a prescription for atenolol, which partially blocks adrenaline (a β₁ blocker). Other beta-blockers are sometimes prescribed to treat migraines, and one of the side effects of atenolol is that it sometimes relieves migraines.
So far, its effects on my headaches have been marginal at best. But give it another week.
One thing I did notice, however, is that about an hour after I took my first dose, my BP dropped to about 100/65, leading to another noted side effect, dizziness. Since then, my BP has partially rebounded (120/75), but it’s still lower than it was before.
