[grogenaut]

I found that taking it at home helped a lot with white coat syndrome, I was more relaxed and more able to tell when I'd settled. I also just set a timer when walking and told the nurse "no not yet" when they tried to take my BP. They listened except the one nurse who insisted I was wrong and that I was 5'11" not 6'2" which was entered in by the urgent care the day before because people get shorter as they get older. You know, a day later, at 40, after being 6'2" since I was 18. no possible way she could be wrong, everyone else was. Also tried to mark me as an active smoker because I'd been in a resturant with smoking before, in the 90s and she had magically never been around smoke in her 50 years. The doctor corrected the smoker note but the height hung around in some SOT field even though the next 15 height measurements were 6'2" until I had an extra 10 minutes with a PA who went over all my records with me and corrected things.

I had trouble with 2 of the BPs drugs, one gave me head spins in the afternoon seated in my car sometimes, another gave me the dry cough (could feel a prickle in my thorat). My bp is actually high esp when I've had caffiene (what coder doesnt), move around, etc, but it's usually low pre-hyper tension. I also had it taken about 300 times in the last 6 months getting certified as an EMT. There's a LOT of variation in how the tools take the BP and just how close you're listening. I compared a manual cuff with one of the fancy automated ones and it's not that hard to hear your dystolic down 10 below what the automated reads. Same with systolic, you can hear it higher if you really listen before it starts sounding like a watch with another 10 spread, and you leave that cuff at 200 for 10 seconds and everyone's going to read higher and tense up more. I can feel my blood pressure surge any time an automated machine decides "nope I need to go higher on systolic" and it squeezes and I know I'm going to read high and have yet another conversation with the nurse and doctor. Just take it to 200 and come down stupid machine.