About Last Night
No, not The Incredible Hulk.
Last night I received a text from my surgery asking me to log a blood pressure test, obviously they assumed I had a blood pressure machine at home. We actually do but that’s by the by.
I thought I’m not going to do the test there and then this was 9pm at night so I pushed it out of my head (so I thought) and decided I’d do the test today.
I woke up early hours of the morning with intense feelings running through my body and realized my thinking was way too fast for my liking, maybe I’d had a bad dream and not been aware of the content of it. I managed to calm myself down but the blood pressure test sprang to mind and again I pushed it down so I could go back to sleep.
So, to this morning
I furtled around in the cupboard looking for the blood pressure test kit, eventually finding it behind the myriad of catnip toys – can’t have the kitties getting high on too many catnip toys at once.
I took it upstairs with me as I had to log in for some online Pilates training and didn’t want to be late so the machine sat next to me on the desk.
It’s got a pale green armband and connector which fixes to a cream & green colored box and it sat there in full view as I got underway with my training.
After a while I started to feel incredibly uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable I got the more annoyed I got with this box in my view. Could have put it on the shelf out of view I guess but I didn’t.
Instead I let insecurity get the better of me to the extent my heart rate went up. It felt like every heartbeat was reverberating in my head, I got clammy, then I fixated on my heart rate as it continued to spiral upward.
I had yet to take a blood pressure test. I wasn’t going to whilst I felt “off”.
NEVER, NEVER, NEVER google symptoms.
Fast heart rate plummeted me into a world of “holy s**t something serious is happening to me” as I read what it could potentially mean and potentially lead to.
Then my wise little man walked into the room (I say little, he’s 21), asked me if I was ok. I said not really no I was getting worked up. “What about?” he asked so I explained. His response?
“Really Mum?”
“You’re sat there with a box next to you that you’ve associated a meaning to”
BOOM.
White Coat Syndrome
I don’t like doctors surgeries, or hospitals for that matter. Ever heard of ‘white coat syndrome’? Well, that would be me. Every time I had to go, insecure feelings would be generated. They’d end up doing blood pressure tests several times over a visit to see if it was just me.
It always was just me. Thankfully I’ve never had a blood pressure issue.
My issue has been my thinking – or more to the point the speed of my thinking. But this morning I genuinely didn’t see the correlation of what I was doing to myself.
This innocuous little box innocently sat on the desk next to me hadn’t suddenly been possessed and attacked me. I had attacked myself with my own thinking about what that box meant.
I went for a walk to clear my head and the adrenalin from my body, came back and took the test.
Normal (ish).
In fact it was slightly low after I checked the reading to the chart!
I had innocently forgot where my experience was coming from and caused an awful lot of unnecessary unpleasant feelings.
WHY do we do that?!