My new blood-pressure device lowballs me—at least my diastolic number. I'm coming in under 80, which is a damn sight different from the 90-some that I was reading while I was in hospital. Either the hospital was reading me too high, or the new machine is reading me too low. Another possibility could be that my pressure has radically dropped over the past four days, but I wonder what doc would go with that hypothesis. Then again, the new machine makes my systolic out to be 130-something, which is high. So who knows what's going on? I sure don't. All I know for sure is that I have very little trust in these machines.
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
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I've been doing daily BP monitoring for several years now. I can't attest to the day-to-day accuracy, but I do look for trends over the course of several days. My "normal" is mid-130s over mid-80s. That might sound high since I take BP meds, but I used to be 160s. Anyway, sometimes I'll get a reading that is in the 140s so I do another check. Most times the second reading is closer to "normal". If I get two highs in a row, I accept that my BP is up, even though I don't know why. I might get one of those higher than normal readings every couple of weeks.
That's the long way of saying just try to average out your readings over several days to get a better sense of where your BP is going. Oh, I also take mine at the same time everyday.
HJ recently got a BP device as well, because her BP came out as rather high during her recent stay in the hospital and on subsequent visits. Both her diastolic and systolic came out lower when she first tried it, but she's been measuring regularly now for a week or so and getting fairly consistent results. What does this mean? One theory she has is that just being in the hospital makes her BP rise, which, given how stressful the experience tends to be, makes sense to me.
Having a lower diastolic and a higher systolic is a bit weird. Is it higher than what it was when you were in the hospital, or are both numbers lower now?
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