My doctor has challenged me to cut 500 calories from my daily total. This should be a cinch since I already can't eat 80% of what I'd love to be able to if I could, right? Guys, for me this means cutting those giant salads in half. I'm not kidding.
Anyway, very thrilled with the awesome hepatic panel coming back all super normal. Now the biggie is cutting down my blood pressure med, whaaaa?
I've been on blood pressure meds since my 20's because of a rhythm problem that was eventually corrected (years later, so like eventually eventually), and leading up to the procedure that fixed it saw me on the absolute fullest possible dose anyone can go with a beta blocker for a couple of years. I had started out on a calcium channel blocker, and as compliant as I tried to be, that stuff only made other things worse, so I found the beta blocker much more tolerable. I was supposed to be getting off it after the procedure, but my blood pressure shot up for some unknown reason and taunted me until we all assumed I'd just be on it the rest of my life.
Cut to years later, I'm old enough to actually be on a blood pressure med, my blood pressure started spiking wildly out of control, and I went up and down and in and out with this beta blocker. My doctor's been trying to get me off it since 2011 and my heart goes nuts on everything else. One of the most miserable months I've ever been through was switching off blood pressure meds every week until we were forced to go back to the beta blocker. And then suddenly in 2012 we figured out it was the birth control I'd been on all that time. Dumped the birth control, boom, blood pressure went down, I was able to cut the beta blocker dose in half again, and everything was wonderful. It was the lowest dose I'd been on since I started blood pressure meds.
And since then it has very slowly been bumped back up. My body's had enough of this beta blocker and fights it. It's done. I'm getting weird symptoms like super Raynaud's (suddenly freezing in the middle of summer isn't always thyroid, apparently) and now my doctor thinks me going so scatterbrained again (I'm at the Scott having to tie one scene in a show over to the next level of stupid) is the beta blocker. He added a different calcium channel blocker during the big allergy thing in April, I finally broke through the noncompliance and just stuck with it, and NOW I'm being instructed to slowly cut down the beta blocker.
I've been through some hefty med withdrawals through the years, but this one has truly been the hardest. It's an awful thing to be so sensitized to every little bitty thing your heart does that most people never feel, thanx to living with that arrhythmia for so long, and after March sucking for being the worst arm pain I've ever come through in physical therapy and April sucking for being the toughest allergy season I've ever come through on the inhaler and May sucking for the ongoing therapy that is bringing more main nerve trunk back online (referred pain is a bitch and a half, but it's better than losing function over nerve compression death), I get to spend June sucking now for what I hope does NOT become a noteworthy month. I've pretty much already been through the blood pressure and rhythm problems from hell over a series of years, so the only way this could be worse is if I have an actual heart attack or something, but I'm pretty sure it'll still play hell with my anxiety.
So I'm going to focus on cutting 500 calories from a healthy diet that is already so restricted by food allergies and diabetes that most of y'all would think you were in some kind of boot camp, and I'm going to suck it up because hopefully I'm this close to becoming Madonna, and all this crap I've gone through getting my life back after years of literal crippling pain will have been worth it.
I've asked in past posts on various blogs what a person would be willing to go through to get what they want, and the evil villain commitment it takes to focus and do what it takes no matter how hard it gets and how alone one feels doing it. It gets weird sometimes...
And this is what you get when you put Lady Gaga and Benedict Cumberbatch into the youtube search bar together. Oh, nothing, just psyching up for more physical therapy in a few hours.
Aaaaand we're going there. Subtextually speaking, this is all metaphorical for me. Pinky Robot needs to own the webs. My driven passion has been underground all spring conquering multiplayer, need to get it back out here in the open. You guys have no idea how much behind the scenes stuff I've been juggling, as it were. I mean, besides what I just told you. Time to run.
