And the verdict so far?

At the end of September, I wrote about a little bump in my life.

Today I met my new doctor, "Dr. B", who is an internist. I did have a family practitioner as my main doctor, but if things are wrong with me on the inside? I want someone who specializes on the insides. So when I was in the cardiac unit of the hospital, I asked a doc for any recommendations as I was going to be looking for a new doc to handle this health issue. He gave me a practice that's about 5 miles from my kids' school. I called that office the day after I got out of the hospital and TODAY was my appointment.

I still did go see my regular doc 2 weeks ago to get my normal "yearly" checkup. When my birthday comes around, I like to get all the "yearly" stuff taken care of. This way I don't have to remember what month my last set of tests/exams were done. It's kind of like how people recommend that we change out the batteries in our smoke detectors when we change our clocks for daylight savings. You know?

When the medical assistant brought me back, I was faced with the dreaded weigh-in. And this time? I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd lost about 10 pounds since I started running in August. I'm at my self-imposed target weight. What's nice to know is that not only did I lose some significant fat but I also gained some muscle. The muscle can be seen in my legs. O-yeah! No more jiggly-wiggly in my thighs. Makes me very happy! Even better was that my blood pressure was normal -- 110/82. Back to where it should be.

Dr. B ordered some blood work for me. Unfortunately, they couldn't draw the blood today because it has to be a fasting blood draw. I've got that scheduled for this Wednesday. He want them to check for a bunch of anomalies since there's no glaring issues that seem to have caused my hypertensive event in September.

Dr. B then said if the blood work all looks good, he'll do another test on me. I'll have to wear a blood pressure monitor for an entire day. The machine will monitor my pressure throughout the day and record it. Then Dr. B will be able to see how my pressure fluctuates throughout the day. He said the only things I am forbidden to do (if I end up with the device) is swim, shower, and have sex. He-he-he! That totally made me laugh. What I was concerned about is if I happened to want to take a run. He said that it would be great if I could take a run with it. Then he could see how my pressure handled things when I exercised and how it reacted afterwards when I was cooling down.

If the 24-hour blood pressure monitoring looked good? Then he'd take me off the meds I'm currently taking. He definitely DOES NOT want to just take me off the meds without first getting another set of blood tests run AND doing the 24-hour monitoring. He doesn't want to have another incident.

But things are looking good on the health front. I'm glad. I'm so relieved. Things are looking up!