No Go for Diovan

If you remember back in July, my heart doctor put me on Diovan once a day. He said a small dose of 40 mg would not cause any trouble for my yo-yo BP. Well, I tried it, as I mentioned before, and when my BP was normal (which is most of the time), it would bring it even more down, and I would feel lethargic, light headed and in a fog for a couple of hours.

As you also may remember, I called the PA and she was not sure what to try, but gave me a whole spectrum of choices: take ½ instead of a full one; take it at night, when the BP is higher, take it ONLY when I measure the blood pressure and I know for sure that it’s high… etc. After reading more online, and considering her “recommendations” as very volatile – I decided to stop taking it unless my BP is so high that it scares me.

That is – in case I measure it and I know it’s high. I measure it several times a week, but not every day. And occasionally, it’ll be high, like in the 150’s (for the systolic value), and I’d take ½ of a pill – usually at night. I have only one account of when I took ½ a pill and I measured the blood pressure after several hours, and it had come down to 110 over 60 from 150 over 95, I believe. So, it works! But how are you supposed to keep measuring it twice a day, every day, and walk around with your pressure meter and your pills, and your notepad, and have a life on top of that?!

Sure, I don’t recommend anything to anyone. But for me, I decided I’m not going to be paranoid about it. I’ll take ½ of a pill only if it’s high. It still makes me uncomfortable to take BP meds randomly, but I’d rather do that than take them all the time, add more chemicals to my cocktail, and feel like crap, when my blood pressure is too low!

My blood pressure has been better, because I have been more active than I normally am in the winter, and also because I have tried to keep the wine consumption low at night, when the BP was rising. So far, so good on the numbers.

Other than the (very!) occasional Diovan (maybe 2-3 times a month), the only thing added was the 50,000 IU Vitamin D which apparently did the trick for my D levels. No side effects that I can see there. I have stopped, however, the calcium I was taking as in many reports online you are advised against taking it while on high dosages of D, especially when you have a history of hardened arteries and plaque deposits. The doctor never recommended for or against the calcium – this is, again, my own decision, if you will.

But after all, it is our own life, isn’t it?!

Study: Stents for the Brain

Because there is virtually no history of heart attacks in my FH family, but there are tons of examples of stroke, of all sorts of severity levels, I found this article interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/health/research/08stent.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y