Struggles with Hypotension and paying attention to my Adrenals for the first time in a decade.

I worked for a green house cleaning company in San Francisco called Dirty Donnie's Green Cleaning. In their add on Craig's List they wore pin-up retro type dresses and aprons and wielded dusters and vacuums like they were weapons. They had tattoos and piercings and purple hair and I knew these were the people for me. In spite of being fifteen minutes late for the interview I got the job and grew close to the girls I worked with.

Dirty Donnie's gave me the opportunity to act out Non-Harming in a professional way; serving my community with biodegradable, non-toxic cleaning supplies. It also allowed me to get acquainted with the magical city by the bay. To this day, if you are lost in San Francisco, you go ahead and give me a call and I can get you at least within a few blocks of where you wanted to go (contrast that to my knowledge of the city I live in now, Portland... its rough  not knowing which was is true north). I got to meet new people and get familiar with the nooks and crannies of beautiful S.F. homes. It was great.

My blood pressure, however, did not think it was so great. In between climbing hills and flights of stairs carrying buckets of supplies and a vacuum, running every hour to move my car, and all the reaching up above my head and crouching down low, I was constantly seeing stars and feeling faint. I would lament to Marcos that there just weren't enough snacks and water in the world that could keep me from a low blood pressure crash. I kept at it, waiting for my body to adjust, pouring myself into an exhausted puddle upon my arrival home, turning down invites to parties and other fun things because I just couldn't lift my head. 

Before long we moved back home to Fresno, my hypotension still unresolved.

It wasn't until my arrival in Portland, and my new job with a new green cleaning company, that these issues resurfaced and demanded some attention. 

It was my first day on the job, in fact I didn't even know I had the job yet, when it started again. I began to loose spacial relations, seeing stars and feeling sick and faint. I was sucking down protein bars and water like there was no tomorrow. Nothing helped. My anxiety is health triggered, so I knew living a life where I felt this way all the time was just not an option. A friend suggested that I might have Postural Orthostatic Hypotension Syndrome and after looking up the symptoms I'd say wow, I totally do (thanks to years of an eating disorder). I introduced more salt into my diet. I bought vitamin water. Ate smaller, more frequent meals and drank white tea (the least caffeinated tea, but still caffeinated enough) to carry me through the blood pressure slump that often follows meal time. It helped, but it was apparent that this was still an issue.

I talked to my mom, the knower of all things, and she (in the kindest, most loving way possible) firmly let me have it for not caring for my adrenals. And she was right; someone like me, with chronic anxiety issues, needs to spend some time lovingly repairing the damage done to those little guys. They've been working overtime my whole life, constantly fighting and flighting. When I think of them I think of Evinrude from The Rescuers, sputtering and coughing after flying so fast and so hard to deliver the message. My Mom encouraged me to not just accept that I had this Postural Orthostatic Hypotension Syndrome, but to find out why. And she suggested the first place I look was to my adrenals.

This was echoed at the supplement store by an employee who said he had major anxiety issues till he started taking care of his adrenals. Gaia, the brand he suggested, was just too much money, so I opted for the more affordable WomenSense Anti-Stress AdrenaSense Forumal. A few days taking the lower dosage showed little to no results so I upped myself to the maximum and saw a change the next day. It was a subtle change, but this type of healing is made up of subtle changes (little by little, a little becomes a lot) and it was the mere difference between standing up and not feeling faint, vs standing up and feeling faint. Soon I found myself making it through a day having cleaned two house, and still feeling capable of speaking. Nothing short of a miracle.

An interesting aside; Healing yourself natural through herbs and supplements is a trial and error type of a process. You must have patience and a willingness to keep trying, keep exploring. Talk to your supplement store; most will let you return something if it isn't working, or they can offer you a free trial pack of pills. When this WomenSense didn't appear to be working (this was before I upped my dosage) I switched to a new brand of pills, with completely different ingredients. I only took it for three days, and I just didn't feel as good as I had been feeling. I'd also been more anxious than I was previously, more on edge, much more phobic. It was my mom (the knower of all things, knower and noticer) that saw the connection between three days on a new medicine, and three days of higher anxiety. I switched back to WomenSense and all was well. So my urging to you is keep your ear tuned into your body, and be willing to be patient and explore the options. What works for one person might not work for you. That's okay.

Taking this medicine has not freed me up from the responsibility of nutrition and lifestyle. Far from it, I still have to take care of myself for these pills to be able to do their job. I typically drink two 1 quart jars of water a day. There was one day where I was working and for some reason I only had one. I was up all night on a cycle of having to get up and pee, and then being so thirsty that I gulped down two glasses of water. Then up to pee again, and more water. The next day I felt so weak; my blood pressure was on the floor, dragging behind me. All because I didn't give my body the water it needed.

So the moral of the story? As you move through your anxiety, as you began to repair and build new pathways, other areas that need attention will become apparent. That's okay. It's not that this process is never ending (though it can feel like that) it means its multi layered. It means our needs aren't always obvious. Once we deal with the tyranny of the urgent, we then have the space to address the more subtle urgencies, following it down to its source, to grasp it at the root.

-A.