My regular hypertension check-up with the doctor took place last week. A blood test showed low sodium levels. Normal levels are between 136 to 145 mEq/l. Mine is 131 mEq/l. Doc says anything below 130 is not good. He thinks its the diuretics he prescribed to help control the blood pressure. At 12.5mg of chlorothiazide, this is actually a low dose but apparently, he thinks it has caused sodium levels to fall as a cumulative, long-term effect.

To counter this, he took me off the hydrochlorothiazide and kept me on Nifidepine 60mg only. I did tell him that after surgery sometime back, I took myself off the hydrochlorothiazide since I found that the BP was well-managed and in fact, was on the low side. But after about 2 to 3 weeks, I found the BP rising again to well past 145/100, so I put myself back on the meds. Since then its been well-controlled at readings of 110/75.

So for now, I'm off the diuretic and diligently monitoring my BP to see what the impact would be. So far so good. BUT the bad news is, I am already seeing some changes to sleep and pee patterns which I am not sure are healthy or not in the longer run. These are:

• Significantly reduced pee levels. I peed TWICE in the daytime yesterday - once in the morning when I woke up and then nothing for the whole day until I got home. Imagine - I never visited the loo even once in the entire working day! Its been like this since I got off the meds last week. Funny thing is, while I don't pee much in the day, I wake up to pee once in the middle of the night - which I find very disruptive and something I have not done since I went on the meds.

• Disturbed sleep. I either find difficulty getting to sleep or sustaining sleep. And my dreams have been generally disturbing ones that leave me awake in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep or generally in light, troubled sleep. I do not sleep soundly and I wake up feeling draggy and tired.

I am blogging this because I need to keep a log of any changes that might be attributed to the change in meds for discussion purposes with the doctor when I next see him.