My Blood is Boiling

We'd only been home three weeks from our Australian sojourn but were eager to head south once Christmas was over. This year, the weather cooperated with mild, showery days; no snow, nor wind, nor ice to contend with. We were so excited to get back into Maggie and hit the road but there was a special event we were rushing down to in Las Vegas – our daughter, Tracey was getting married.

We soared down Interstate 5 stopping at our usual haunts. It's a routine now; first night Chehalis, Washington, then Seven Feathers Casino in Southern Oregon, Rolling Hills Casino in Corning, California but then we added a new stop – Harris Ranch just off the freeway in southern California.


It's a massive working ranch and they've built a truck stop and a rambling Spanish-styled hotel and restaurant. Of course their specialty is 'beef' and Fernie just had to have some. We chose the pub-like restaurant rather than the family one and were seated in front of a gigantic roaring fire. It was chilly enough outside that we enjoyed the warmth. Fernie declared his steak 'the best he'd ever had'. Our next stop was Bakerfield, then Primm, Nevada and finally Las Vegas where we once again pulled Maggie up outside our friends' house (L&J who were with us in Australia).

I had been feeling kind of crumby on the drive south. We'd eaten out in Chehalis and the next night in Oregon with friends who'd driven up from Rogue River to see us and my tummy was rebelling. So it was back onto Nexium to stop the acid boiling. But to further the aggravation, the glands in my neck swelled up and my tongue and gums became ulcerated and seemingly too big for my mouth. Some other bothersome details that I won't mention made me feel just awful and kept me up all night. So when we got to Las Vegas, I went to a clinic to find out what ailed me. It turned out that thankfully I just had a urinary infection and 'thrush' in my mouth instead of what I dreaded, 'diabetes'. Never search the internet for what's wrong with you. But horror of horrors, the doctor's face got very serious when she was taking my blood pressure – it was 'over the top'. I was sure I was going to die right there on the spot. Of course, those that know me well are not surprised to hear that I did over-react which probably sent my BP even higher. With warnings to follow a low-salt diet and prescriptions in hand we rushed over to Costco to get a BP monitor and buy the assumedly expensive medications needed to bring my BP down and curtail the multi-infections. The meds turned out to be dirt cheap. Antibiotics, a medicated mouth wash and the BP drugs totalled about $12. So what's this fuss the Americans are making about their expensive prescription drugs. I was also sent to the lab for full blood work and got the results the next day – all fine.

The next few days, I took my meds and my BP religiously but it was difficult to watch salt intake – we were in Las Vegas for gawd's sake. Yikes! It wasn't going down. So back to the doctor's again to find that my new BP monitor was faulty. Back it went to Costco and I bought the more expensive one – the Cadillac of BP monitors. In the meantime though, the doctor told me I could come into their office daily and the nurse would take my BP gratis. But it still didn't go down sufficiently. Fernie was ready to cart me back home again where doctor's visits are free. It wasn't until we left Las Vegas, I'd finished the antibiotics and we stopped eating out in restaurants that it plunged back down again and now it's too low. Now, I'm faced with slowly lowering the dose until it evens off to 'normal'.