Blood pressure is stopping everything now

 Last month, I had two appointments that had to be stopped because my blood pressure readings were too high to safely proceeded (230/120).

The first of these appointments was at the start of the month and was for an endoscopy, which I wasn't too heartbroken about it being cancelled, but I did go to see my GP afterwards, to see what he could do to ensure the next one would go ahead.

My GP wrote an email to a consultant he knew of in cardiology, who may be interested in my "interesting" case. He also doubled up my dose of Propranolol to 2 x 40mg / day. This only lasted for a couple of days as I started feeling very unwell, and couldn't keep out of the toilet, so back down to 2 x 20mg/day for me.

The following week was my appointment with the respiratory lab, and once again the same thing happened. After about 20 minutes of setting up, my blood pressure was checked and again it was far too high to consider doing any exertion, so the appointment was cancelled. 

A few days later, I got a call from my GP's surgery, saying they had an appointment for me the following day. The next day, I found out that it was because of my blood pressure and my GP was lost as to the next step to take. Two GPs had multiple attempts with the various blood pressure medications available to them. They had also made multiple attempts to request advice and to refer me to cardiology, but were dismissed every time.  The only option left was to send me into hospital, to the CAU ward, to let them try to fix my blood pressure.

That visit to CAU only lasted about an hour, where they looked at my medical records and informed me that its endocrinology that takes care of blood pressure at NHS Forth Valley, not cardiology. They looked at the blood pressure measurements that I had made at home and mentioned that my notes said that the last NHS 24hr blood pressure measurement I had showed normal values. They said they would arrange another 24hr measurement and then discharged me.

Something felt wrong about that statement, so I checked my notes when I got back home and that 24hr NHS measurement was nothing like normal.

Looking at the endocrinology letters, the one issued just after this 24hr measurement talked about the average measurements being normal, but average measurements are no good when you are about to have a hospital procedure.

Letter from Jan 2024

Looking at the letter from endocrinology that was issues just before this one, the consultant had said that if my results from the latest urine test came back as normal, that she would refer me on to cardiology. Well from the letter snippet above, which came out after the urine test, you will also see that my test results were "completely normal", so at that point I should have been referred on to cardiology.

Letter from Nov 2023

Those letters came out at the end of Nov 2023 and the start of Jan 2024, but no cardiology referral has come out of this. There appears to be something that is preventing cardiology from seeing me.

In an attempt to join all of this together, I wrote a letter to the CAU consultant and my GP, copying in my respiratory consultant and the endocrinology consultant. I suggested that a new 24hr measurement was not needed as my home measurements agreed with the NHS measurements back then, and are now showing my blood pressure has become worse.

Letter to doctors August 2025

Hopefully in within the next week, there will be some positive feedback to report on. We will just have to wait and see.