When I got to the ER, the irregular heart rhythm had stopped but my blood pressure was very high.

Impressively high. Higher than I have ever seen in real life.

I am an overachiever. 🙂

My question was: Why was it so high?

I was questioned and johnny’d and hooked up to monitors and IV’d and tested by the staff and hours (many, many hours) later, we had a potential answer:

Electrolyte imbalance: low potassium level.

Whew! Now that the cause was known, it could be corrected and I would be fine, right?

I was given potassium 40 mEq to take in the ER to begin to correct the imbalance. Potassium 40 mEq was delivered as two giant 20 mEq pills. I have given them to others many times but this was the first time I had to choke them down myself. The pill starts to dissolve almost as soon as you put it in your mouth, and forms a chalky mass that is no fun at all to try to swallow. At one point I had to decide whether to keep trying to get it to go down or try to regurgitate it and start over. There was a second round of this to take after I got home, but the nurse asked (thank you, thank you) for it to be dispensed as four coated 10mEq tablets (which turned out to be infinitely easier to swallow).

I got home very early in the morning the next day and dutifully took the additional doses of potassium and waited for my blood pressure to go down.

And waited, and waited …

After a few days, it was clear that this intervention may be preventing the arrhythmia from recurring but clearly it was not solving the blood pressure issue.

I was going to have to figure it out myself.

To be continued … Read Part 1 here: My trip to the ER