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There’s no getting around it this time. A couple of years ago, when COVID knocked me flat, I suspected there might be lingering effects.
For example, most mornings I now wake up sounding like I’ve spent forty years chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes behind a truck stop. I bark, wheeze, and cough with such enthusiasm that the neighborhood wildlife probably assumes an elderly seal has taken up residence on the ridge.
And the coughing doesn’t politely stick to mornings.
Oh no.
It also likes to make surprise appearances in the middle of the night—usually around 2:30 a.m., which seems to be the universe’s official time for respiratory drama. Sometimes it’s just a few miserable minutes of hacking and glaring resentfully at the ceiling. Other times it goes on for an hour. Miserable doesn’t even begin to cover it. We’re talking the kind of coughing fit that makes you briefly consider writing your will on the back of a Kleenex box.
So after a heroic amount of denial and a fair amount of theatrical sighing, I finally trudged down off the ridge to consult actual medical professionals.
The verdict?
Well … alarming might be the polite way to put it.
Apparently the “junk”—their charming clinical term is mucus—has been hanging out in my lungs like a group of freeloading college students who refuse to move out after graduation. According to the doctor, this sticky little squatters’ convention has been interfering with my breathing for quite some time.
When the lungs slack off, the heart steps in to compensate. And my heart, apparently, has been pulling double shifts.
The doctor explained all of this with charts, diagrams, and what I believe was a brief lecture on oxygen exchange. But the takeaway was simple: my heart is working harder because my lungs are underperforming. The result is stiffness and enlargement. Neither is a good thing.
Apparently this was easy to detect with a stethoscope. The doctor listened for a moment, nodded thoughtfully, and then informed me that more testing will be needed. There may be additional treatment later.
But for now, my very high blood pressure needs immediate attention.
Let me repeat that for dramatic effect:
Me. High. Blood. Pressure.
This is deeply offensive to my family history. The women in my clan are famous for the opposite. Our blood pressure has historically been so low it borders on decorative. My mother once had a reading so low the nurse checked the equipment twice and looked at her like she might be operating on ghost power.
Yet here I am.
Even the doctor seemed puzzled because I have absolutely no symptoms. No chest pain. No shortness of breath. No swollen ankles.
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Nuthin’.
So now I’m undergoing more tests while taking medication that did, to be fair, lower my blood pressure by thirty points in one week. Unfortunately, it also made me so dizzy that I experienced motion sickness for the first time in my life. I get woozy standing still. At one point I felt like I might need Dramamine just to walk across the front porch.
Naturally, being who I am, I immediately dove down every internet rabbit hole known to mankind. Medical journals, wellness blogs, obscure Scandinavian breathing techniques—if it involves lungs, arteries, or the vague promise of not keeling over prematurely, I’ve probably read about it.
One interesting thing I’ve learned is that many blood pressure medications don’t actually address the root cause. Instead, they adjust the arteries so the pressure reading improves.
That’s helpful, certainly. But it also means the underlying problem may still be lurking around like a villain in a mystery novel.
And I have no intention of becoming a cautionary statistic in the category of “symptoms successfully managed, but the patient didn’t make it.”
So my plan is simple.
I will absolutely follow medical advice. Doctors went to school for an absurd number of years, and I respect that.
But I’m also going to keep researching root causes and exploring natural ways to help my body do what it’s supposed to do.
Because deep down—despite inhalers, blood pressure monitors, and the alarming amount of medical vocabulary suddenly entering my life—I am still, at heart (no pun intended), an aging granola girl.
And granola girls tend to believe the body deserves a little help fixing the problem, not just hiding the symptoms.