Medical bulletin

I had an appointment with my GP yesterday. It was the first time in a year so it was like an annual check-up.

I have two ongoing issues - high blood pressure and an enlarged prostate. The latter ailment I share with King Charles although mine doesn’t need surgery (yet).

Instead I take two pills a day and if I remember to take both the symptoms are manageable, which is probably all the information you need.

High blood pressure can lead to a stroke, apparently, especially in men my age, so another of my daily pills (I take four in total, including a statin) is designed to reduce it.

For years however it has remained obstinately high, probably due to my weight, but yesterday my GP took my blood pressure and declared it “normal”.

To say we were astonished is an understatement. I even queried whether his monitor was working properly.

The bad news is that, since Christmas, my feet and ankles have experienced mild swelling which is an occasional side effect of one of the pills I have been taking.

My GP has therefore prescribed a weaker version of the same pill but says it will probably result in my blood pressure going up again.

So I currently have a choice. A return to high blood pressure - that can lead to a stroke - or itchy, swollen ankles.

In the meantime, I have been offered a pneumonia jab which I am going to have on Tuesday.

When I am 65, in a few weeks, I also qualify for the shingles vaccine which I will probably have because I had shingles once, in my early twenties, and it was extremely painful.

Fortunately, because I was young and my body could fight it off, I only had it for a month, but I remember an older man - an architect at the Barley Mow Workspace in Chiswick where I then worked - experienced it for 18 months and it was very debilitating.

I thought that if you’ve had shingles once you couldn’t get it again, but my GP said that isn’t the case, so if I get offered a vaccine I’ll take it.

What else? Oh yes, for years I’ve had a lump on one shoulder. An MRI scan in 2022 showed it isn’t a tumour but it’s getting bigger and if I don’t want to end up like Quasimodo I should probably have it removed.

However, because it’s classified as ‘cosmetic’, the NHS won’t touch it and I will have to go private, at considerable cost.

“If it was me I’d have it done,” said my GP, who also had surgery on a similar, albeit much smaller, lump two years ago.

Then again, as he also told me, he got mate’s rates.

He also hinted that I am drinking too much, although he eventually agreed that half a bottle of wine, four days a week, is not excessive.

The conversation did however take me back to when I was a student and all my flatmates, including me, were diagnosed with (mild) alcohol poisoning.

Today I’m far more likely to poison myself with too much caffeine.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

Despite my decades of smoking from childhood to pension age, I am thankful to be in good health with no serious health issues although being 65 is obviously not the same as being 25. Like all machines, we humans begin to wear out a bit after a lifetime of use whatever fad or fashion healthists push on us with the scam promise of eternal life if we just become a bit more like them.

Meanwhile, the NHS and the Government owe me a packet for all the consumer tax I have paid over 57 years without receiving a single penny back in healthcare for an alleged "smoking related" illness.