As some here might remember, in early August I was admitted to the hospital in the big city because of vast eruptions of coughing up blood, a phenomenon that came suddenly, out of thin air. I lost about two pints of blood, and had to discard seven bath-towels and various other linen, because blood-stains don't wash out.
The neighbor thought I had suffered some massive gunshot wounds, when I finally got around to going over to his place to seek help.
In the hospital, once all of the leaks were sealed, the blood pressure mysteriously skyrocketed way up into the stratosphere. I was utterly conscious and competent while this all was going on, but missed seeing some things.
The blood pressure went up and stubbornly refused to come down, and for a while I was on high blood pressure pharmaceuticals, for a couple of months, until life returned to normal, with readings circa 110/70.
What was a mystery until recently was how I had managed to escape high blood pressure for more than a couple of decades. All of my old records showed consistently "good" or even "low" readings. Never a problem.
Genetically, the odds are about those of winning the Powerball lottery, that I could escape high blood pressure, given that every family member--excepting the ones who died young--on both sides of the family had high blood pressure, going back at least four generations. Every single one of my forebears, no exceptions.
High blood pressure was always one of the three principal "causes of death" for the parents and all the siblings. I never thought much about it, considering that they died of the afflictions and ailments of affluence and the too-easy life.
Well, it is possible to win the Powerball lottery, but not probable.
The physician finally looked a history of my diet.
I had thought I was killing one bird with one stone, but now it appears I had been killing two birds with one stone.
When I was a freshman at the University of Nebraska, I got afflicted with the primitive disease, which also ails pregnant women and desk-sitting bureaucrats, that of bloated blood vessels at the terminal end of the alimentary canal.
I went to the student health center frequently, where I was constantly prescribed.....at first, Darvon, and then Percodan. I was only 18 years old at the time, and green in judgement, but even then I knew that these were just pain-killers, having nothing to do with curing the problem. I wanted the problem cured; the pain would then take care of itself.
But no, I was constantly prescribed these controlled substances, which I never took, flushing them all down the commode instead.
Finally, one weekend I had a chance to get back to the Sandhills of Nebraska, where I saw the old family physician, and described to him what was going on. He told me to pull down my pants, bend over, and then he inserted a glass rod that had been dipped in nitric acid (or silver nitrate; I forget which).
That took care of the problem right away.
Well, I didn't want it to happen again, and so I asked how to avoid it, after which the old family physician told me to stick with whole wheat bread, the rougher the better.
Which I did do.....and since then, which is a very long time ago now, the problem has never recurred, not even a tinge.
In college and of course thereafter, I had of course read Sigmund Freud and his works on how bowel disorders cause all sorts of personality dysfunctions, neuroses, and psychoses, and as I wished to avoid this nonsense too, whereas the old family physician had suggested x amount of fiber and roughage, perhaps something like 5x might be even better.
Apparently I was dining on about 3x the minimum reguirement of fiber.
For years and years; for more than a couple of decades.
There has hardly been anything I have practiced more rigorously than chowing down on excessive fiber and roughage, all but munching on wood-chips as if potato chips. It's all been good.
This is why I still consider the brown bread of Ukraine the best bread I've ever had in my life. The manufacture and distribution of brown bread in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all is a governmental monoply. Other sorts of bread can be made, and sold, by others, but the socialists maintain a tight and exclusive grip on brown bread.
There's all sorts of political reasons for this, but never mind.
The brown bread was sold in 2.2-pound loaves and the cost of the ingredients, and the cost of the labor to produce and distribute brown bread, couldn't possibly be covered with the sort of price that was charged (minuscule), and so the socialists cut corners. This brown bread had flour, of course--but also ground-up potato peelings and sawdust.
And only God knows what else.
More fiber in it than what one would get from eating a tree, it seemed.
I really liked that stuff.
Well, again, it appears I was not killing one bird with one stone, but two birds with one stone.
I had no idea that rough coarse fiber deters high blood pressure.
I notice now that this is in all blood pressure literature, but I never paid attention before, because I wasn't having high blood pressure and so the topic didn't interest me. I was preoccupied with avoiding haemerrhoids, nothing more than that.
So that might go a long way--if not the entire way--in figuring out why those decades of readings circa 110/70 when genetics insisted it had to go higher.
