Blood pressure anxiety

Blood pressure anxiety..
I get this feeling of tightness in my chest, pulsing veins orbeing aware of my heart beat..so a doctor suggested me to get my BP checked at random times of the day. Which I did. Twice it read normal. Today it read slighty higher 140 upper..but my doc asked me if I walked to his office, which I did, it's about a 5 or 7 min walk at most..so he said it's probably the walk reflecting the slight increase. Now, im just wondering how many more readings should I get to get an accurate number..I keep thinking maybe it reads normal when I get checked.
And maybe it elevates later during the day when im more stressed..I've been dealing with some seriously stressful changes..in one of those times that I never even imagined in my worst nightmares..literally in hell..

So can somebody suggest any ideas or share any advice on how can I assure my anxious mind that my BP is not sneaking in silently through the day..

Is it possible for all these physical responses pullsing veins in the body, tightness in chest, being aware of the heart beat to exist without affecting blood pressure?

I've never gotten checked for BP during one of those times when I feel physically triggered..and I've felt this sensations for quite sometime now ..earlier this was a sort of a mild issue and I used to ignore it coz my bp always checked normal so did my kidney function test..now it's a little more profound ..coz I was pulled off meds ( my anxiety meds against my will, long story, a kind of a curse for living in India where the awareness for MI is negligible) for last 6 months ..

So bottom line now is, is there such a thing as sneaky blood pressure? I have health anxiety and my mind tends to run to wards high BP..silent killer ..kidney damage if stays unchecked..

Being off meds for so long I can't steer my mind out of this stressor.. for now ..so I need your help to guide me out this quicksand..

I have blood pressure problems, myself.

Normal blood pressure, net says, is 120/80 and below.

Hypertension is 140/90 and above. You can check those numbers on the net.

You say, "I get this feeling of tightness in my chest, pulsing veins or being aware of my heart beat."

"So can somebody suggest any ideas or share any advice on how can I assure my anxious mind that my BP is not sneaking in silently through the day."

You're right to be wondering and watching it. Blood pressure, is, after all, called the silent killer.

It almost got me the other day. I had a new, for me, and young, doctor a few weeks ago who when I expressed concern over my going bald and that it might be from the b/p medicine, for my son had that happen to him, she suggested going off of b/p medicine. Now, that's pretty stupid. Well, I lowered it, then she suggested an echo and treadmill test, which said, no b/p medicine for 48 hours before the test.

Well, I was already low on b/p med and 2 days after the test I almost died from pain from lack of b/p medicine.

But my tranquilizer which helps a lot with that (Ativan) was nearby, thank goodness, but I just couldn't reach the 4 feet away, but my heating pad was close enough so that helped me get to the medicine. After 2 hours the ordeal was over, except for me calling my heart doctor, just today, with this extra chest pain I have, and wondering, did I have a heart attack, and what should I do? Rest? More medicine?

You say, "And maybe it elevates later during the day when im more stressed..I've been dealing with some seriously stressful changes..in one of those times that I never even imagined in my worst nightmares..literally in hell.."

Yeah, that describes me, both with this latest situation and for 20 years with a bad marriage which caused me chest pain. When the bad marriage ended about 10 years ago, the chest pain ended. Wonder where the chest pain was coming from? How about, tightening of blood vessels in the muscles around the heart from the stress of the really, really bad marriage?

So, you have a right to be concerned.

I know what you're talking about when you say, "Is it possible for all these physical responses pullsing veins in the body, tightness in chest, being aware of the heart beat to exist without affecting blood pressure?

You say, "Now, I'm just wondering how many more readings should I get to get an accurate number..I keep thinking maybe it reads normal when I get checked."

I don't know that there is one, "accurate number." I think you should keep getting it checked, and write down in one notepad what the numbers are each time you get it checked. Can you buy a b/p monitor?

I just came across one of my old notebooks just yesterday, and I kept changing b/p medicine because I kept having chest pain from the current b/p med I was on. I just realized from looking at that 10-15 years later, it wasn't the b/p medicine that was causing me chest pain, it was the stress from my long, bad marriage.

So, I'm not sure b/p medicine relieves chest pain. I think it reduces blood pressure, which is important so that you don't die from that, but I'm not sure that it relieves chest pain caused by stress.

All I can say is, I know what you're going through. I don't know what the solution is. If you can get out of the stressful situation, that would help. I found it very difficult, because I wanted to stay with my child and in my low rent situation house.

Are you on b/p medicine? Do you have a doctor who can give you tranquilizers if the stress gets too much, or is there a long term anxiety medicine? Since this forum is anxiety, there must be such medicines. Can you get on one?

Post Edited (Tim Tam) : 11/15/2018 1:53:16 PM (GMT-7)

Thanks Dan. I was lucky to be sitting where I was. I was sitting in a chair watching TV, thank goodness, because that's where my heating pad is, always plugged in and laying on the bed, thank goodness.

I could see the tranquilizer medicine, Ativan, that has always stopped the bad chest pain, it was only 3 feet away but I couldn't reach it, for one inch turn of my chest, constricting blood vessils to the heart area even more, and I was going to black out. I couldn't get to the heating pad itself, but the cord was only about a foot away, thank goodness, so I reached for the cord and pulled the heating pad toward me, cut it on high, knowing it would loosen the blood vessels and get more blood to the chest area.

I held it there for about 20 minutes hoping it would reduce the pain so I could reach the pills. At about that point, I slid the plastic lawn chair I was sitting in a few inches closer to the life-saving pills. I got the pills, took the first one, waited 20 minutes, not change in the pain, took a 2nd, 30 or more minutes later, my chest as getting better.

If I had been anywhere else in the house, none of that is going to happen. I would have been on the floor, no way to do anything.

Life can be good luck, bad luck. Bad luck, I got the new to me, and new to medicine 28-30 year old doctor who told me to get off my b/p meds because I had mentioned changing that because I was losing hair, so let's say that threw her off. But gosh.

Good luck, I was sitting by my plugged in heating pad and 3 feet from my life saving medicine. I'm dealing with some anger. Lots of anger. Every now and then I just burst out, as much as my chest will allow. I don't want to be around anybody who was supposed to be helping me. But then, I need help, and the next helper/driver could be worse.

Don't know how to deal with this.

My heart doctor put me on a recording saying, by appointment only, which would be dec. 4.

My psychiatrist's nurse, when I called to ask for a refill of Ativan tranquilizer which kept me alive during that, wouldn't give me a refill and said to go to the emergency room.

Either they will tell me I didn't have a heart attack or they will give me good treatment, neither of which I had sitting in my room at home. It's a win/win situation. Had the attack on oct. 26. today is nov.16.

It took me 20 days to get to get to where I am today, fixing to go to the ER. First I had to accept what might be my situation, then I needed to get some data by typing into the search engine, did I just have a heart attack? and, what to do after a heart attack, where it said hospital.

Then I realized where I was, at home, where I wasn't getting any sleeping pills, tranquilizers during the day, increased bp meds. I was just winging it on my regular medicine with no knowledge of what my situation was.

I built up step by step to this. First from the net came the realization, I might need to be in the hospital. Then I got the right advice from my psychiatrist's nurse: you need to go to the hospital. l had the right advice and the right frame of mind. Which proves the point, the person you have to defeat is the person you have to look at in the mirror every morning. This morning I beat him.

Thanks, Dan.

Just got back from taking a battery of tests at the hospital and the guy came in and said, "It looks good, you can go home now."

I said was it a heart attack and he said, "No."

I got an early indication that it was not a heart attack from the first EKG test result woman when I told her I took 2 Ativan tranquilizers and within some 30 minutes or more it stopped the pain. She said in effect, "Ativan does not stop a heart attack." Meaning, if it was stopped by Ativan, it wasn't a heart attack.

I've had these pain chest seizures before, but this one was twice as bad, for it took 2 Ativan to stop it instead of one.

So, I guess this qualifies me for Anxiety, because that's what everyone talks about when I get one of these.

But I'm not nervous when these happen. It could be kind of psychosomatic, because I sit around the house all day by myself, get no socialization which relaxes me and puts me back in contact with the human race. These things build up in my mind.

As for the hospital diagnosis of this event I just went through, the paper work says,

"Diagnosis."
1. Anxiety about health
2. Chest pain of uncertain etiology
3. Mental Health problem
4. High blood pressure disorder

That last one would be bingo, for my blood pressure reading during at the ends of the visit was:

149/74 and pulse was 67, with top number of 140 putting you in the area of hypertension, meaning, you need b/p pills to get you at least back under 140. So, my new (1 month ago) 28-year-old general practice doctor is incorrect about me not needing b/p pills.

So, by cutting back on my blood pressure pills from 2 to 1 a day, and not taking any b/p meds for 48 hours before the Echo and Treadmill stress tests, then I go home that night, take one b/p pill at 5 p.m., and at midnight have this excruciating chest pain, I'm saying there had to be a connection for I haven't had one of those sharp chest pain attacks in a couple of years.

And I've never had one of this intensity, where I had to take 2 Ativans, not just one, to stop it.

So, I'm glad I got through this, but that general practice doctor really made this a difficult time. And my helper really needs to listen to me when I start talking about a health problem, to ask me questions about that to keep the conversation going.

I am glad I got this checked out. It doesn't fully explain the chest discomfort and pain from time to time in the last 3 weeks, unless it's from something like brucites or inflammation from the initial chest pain attack.

I did enjoy seeing the nurses interacting with each other and performing their individual jobs and how nice they were to the patients and how efficient they were. Knowing I as a bipolar couldn't do that, although I did on my level for some years.

When the nurse who put the EKG stickers on me in the first hour, I saw her two hours later for another EKG, I told her, "I enjoyed watching y'all work together and doing your individual jobs. I saw you laughing at times. You don't need to go back to your old hometown so soon from this one like you said earlier you wanted to."

She gave me a smile. Yeah, human interaction. The best medicine. Chest pain. What chest pain?

Thanks Scaredy Cat:

Through it all, I'm thinking if my new, and young some 28-year-old general practitioner may have been right. I don't really need b/p medicine. Now, that really has to be thought about, for high b/p is the silent killer.

So what I want to do is, get a second opinion about that. Also what I want to do is, take 2 b/p pills a day like my original gen. pract. said and I have for a long time, and then take my b/p reading a couple of times a day to see how that reads. Do that for 5 days or more.

Then, try 1 a day, sometimes 2 a day, for 5 days or more and take b/p readings twice a day. Then compare the two, and see if the readings are lower for the two b/p pills a day. Then go to a second b/p doctor or heart doctor and see what they think.

But the ER visit, and the near black out from chest pain, did bring it home again that I am absolutely almost without social contact and that it is almost killing me. That I have Isolation Anxiety.

I'm not really nervous, but I think isolation causes stress, and it attacks the weakest part of my body, my chest, and after a certain amount of time, my body can't take the tenseness of isolation, and whamo! Psychosomatic illness or pain. After all, the worst punishment in prison is isolation.

It's very gradual and insidious. You think you're doing great, that you're handling isolation. And I am, it's just that it's causing me a little more stress every day.

I told my helper this, and she went over several social possibilities: volunteer in a nursing home, in a hospital, and I mentioned join a walking group. From that, I put in a post to a neighborhood website about this and I'm hoping this will be of some benefit.

Thank you again for your note.

just goes to show that even hardened anxiety vets like us can still let it get the better of us even tho we know better and have seen it all with anxiety. sage advice as always tim tam be well