Health Update 1 (10.05.2023)

Hey, guys! I hope everyone is doing alright. I am just here to share an update regarding my health journey at the moment.

Trigger warning because I will be talking about a lot of mental health stuff and even possible mentions of death. Please do proceed with caution with whatever I am about to share. If at any point you feel uncomfortable, please do stop reading.

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Last weekend, I travelled to the capital for both my general and psychiatric appointment. I usually only go there for my psychiatric stuff but it was that time of the year of my tri-annual full health screening. Before I entered the doctor's office, we had to go through a few physical tests like taking weight, checking for blood sugar, height, eye checkups and finally, the blood pressure check-up.

The male nurse who was checking my blood pressure paused and had to retake it again. He was like, “Oh this machine is probably slow". He took my blood pressure again and I noticed the same numbers come up. He looked at me, took a deep breath and asked me, "Are you alright?". I was quite confused and told him that I was feeling okay, I just couldn't sleep well the night before. He then told me that my blood pressure was 188 and it was extremely high. If you didn't know, any blood pressure number from 180-200 is considered a medical emergency and I could've gotten either a stroke or a heart attack. However, I told him that I was fine. He nodded and then sent me off to the doctor's room.

The doctor looked at my results and told me that I have a very bad case of hypertension. He made me do some breathing techniques to calm myself down and then continued on with the test. He asked me a lot of symptoms and some of them, I didn't resonate with. However, one major thing that I did agree on was the fact that no matter what I did, I always felt like I was out of breath, my heart was pounding because of a small flight of stairs and I got bad heart palpitations when I was sleeping. I even have a heavy chest. All this while, I thought it was due to my ADHD medications which can cause high blood pressure. But I was on a very small controlled dosage and I don't take medication before and during my check-ups as it messes with the blood test results.

To make sure that I was going to be fine, he asked me to run a lot of blood tests. It was expensive as hell because the blood tests were more expensive than the entire checkup but I was willing to do it cause I didn't wanna die. Bro, WHY ARE BLOOD TESTS SO ANNOYING? This time the nurse took blood from the top of my hands and it hurt like a motherfucker. Worse part is, I had to sit there for a while because it WAS A FULL BLOOD TEST. He even checked for deficiencies, viruses and other stuff. I had to wait there for so many hours to get my test results because if my doctor saw something wrong, he would have to make me stay back. It was extremely scary because I didn't know what the test results would be.

After a few hours, the doctor explained the results to me and mentioned that I was in the clear and all I needed was iron, folic acid and also to take hypertension medication for at least 2 weeks so that it goes back to normal. He mentions that hypertension and high blood pressure from panic attacks are temporary but can be extremely dangerous which was why he didn't want to take risks. He just gave me some medication, some supplements for the month and then sent me off.

To be honest, I'm still in shock because I couldn't believe that a panic attack could've killed me. And I'm glad that I agreed to go through all the tests. I'm crying because no one believed my mental health problems until it became super physical and could've killed me. I'm happy now that I'm in the clear and I just need to be on a stricter medical routine for 2 weeks until everything subsides. But it still is very scary...

I wanted to say thank you to the Patrons who stayed back with me and continued supporting me. I know that I haven't been posting properly but now you guys know why. I've been going through so much, with my tablet dying and stress with family. It then built up to me overworking when I got the new tablet and I was actually going through so much pain when working, I had 0 idea why. Now I know.

Thank you to everyone who believed in me and stayed back with me, continuing to support me. Tbh, I have no idea what the future holds for me because I do know that my grandfather did pass away from an anxiety-induced heart attack and I'm really scared. But as long as I'm here, I do hope that you guys will still support me and I will still continue posting art here.

Thank you for being patient with me...

If you'd like to tip me, you can do so here. It's totally appreciate it as it helps me continue getting healthcare.

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