Our third baby is six months old and time has gone by incredibly fast. The first ten weeks flew by that I’m still not sure what happened. My family and friends visited, brought meals and gifts, held and helped with the baby, but I don’t know how much of it I took in. I know I loved those moments and they were dreamy. 

Those weeks were hard; I was still trying to figure out where I was. Within those weeks, I went back to the hospital in the middle of the night because my blood pressure was so high I was scared of having a stroke. I could feel my heart beat in my lips, the marching sound of my blood in my ears and my heart raced so fast from anxiety I didn’t know if I could catch my breath. I was scared.

I have high blood pressure. I developed it during my first pregnancy and it hasn’t gone back down since. I can’t control it, it’s part of my family history and it makes me feel like a failure.

I don’t talk about it because like every other problem a person could have, acknowledging it is hard. WE ALL WANT TO BE INVINCIBLE! I know that we all have something that breaks us down whether it’s an illness, cancer, hereditary trait or addiction but coming to terms with this was hard.

I have high blood pressure.

This means I could develop heart disease or have a stroke. I could die earlier than expected and that’s scary. Scary because I have three little kids whom I want to be with always and a husband I want to grow really old with.

So, what can I do to make it not so scary? I take medicine everyday, workout regularly and eat mostly right. Also, I have a yearly physical to make sure that there are no other red flags.

Since this month is heart health awareness month, I thought I would share this and encourage everyone to “know your numbers.” Blood sugar, blood pressure, blood cholesterol and body weight mass index: theses are your numbers that you should know and work on keeping them in the healthy range. Working on these four things reduces my chances of something bad happening greatly and I am thankful for that.

Somethings cannot not be controlled from happening but how you manage them can make all the difference.