Is it some kind of hypertension?

I had a longish session with my Lovely Lady Doctor this afternoon.  It made me laugh actually, because I had a list of things to speak to her about which read

Eyes
Cough
Heart
Knee
Feet

so we had a good giggle about that which made me feel loads better straight away.

I just told her for her information what happened yesterday at the eye clinic, and she was interested to hear that they thought it might not be caused by diabetes but by marginal hypertension.  She said that Dr Adams was beginning to think that the problem might be caused by a kind of increased blood pressure going the wrong way between heart and lung.  Or something like that, if that isn't completely mad!  We had a long discussion about how my blood pressure always seems to be on the high side of "just all right" and in the end she prescribed a Beta Blocker, to see if it might help. 

Later I remembered how I was always fainting when I was a young woman,  so maybe what would be normal blood pressure in other people might be, in fact, high blood pressure for me.

Strangely enough, this evening I was reading in today's Telegraph about a little lad who needs Viagra to keep him alive because he has pulmonary hypertension which causes the blood pressure in the arteries to rise, putting strain on the heart and reducing oxygen levels.  This little lad cannot walk more than a few steps without getting out of breath.  It also said that only 4000 people in the country have the condition which usually affects middle aged women and can lead to heart failure and damage to the lungs.  I was kind of hoping that this might be the answer until I read that it also said the survival rate for most patients is about five years.  So now I'm hoping it isn't that, because I've had the bloody thing for over a year already.

I was going to tell Charles and John about the newspaper article, but I'm not going to now, because I know Charles will automatically assume the worst and get upset, not to mention driving me mad by asking if I'm all right all the time.

She thinks the cough was probably an infection, since it seems a bit better now, she's prescribed more painkillers for the knee and thinks the feet will sort themselves out when I've seen Dr. Adams on the 27th. of this month and he decides what to do next.

I told her how desperate I am to get some proper exercise and she said she would discuss with Dr. Adams whether I could be included in one of the exercise programmes for people with heart disease.  There are a lot of those, but there is no help with exercise for people with atrial fibrillation, which seems mad to me.

Charles has started to wonder if he has a wheat intolerance.  He's certainly had digestive problems for a couple of years, so he's decided to give up wheat for a few weeks to see if he feels any better.  He would tell me this just after I've stocked up the fridge with bread and pizza and have bought a couple of boxes of cereal!  I've told him to go away and research it on the Internet and then come and tell me what he can eat!  How he'll manage without being able to eat the quantities of bread and cake he eats at present, I simply don't know.  My suggestions of carrot sticks and apples were not well received.

I'm just about to go to bed and have to take the first of the Beta Blockers.  She told me to take it just before I go to bed in case my blood pressure drops dramatically and I get dizzy.  Presumably I shan't notice if I'm asleep!