How I monitor my blood pressure

After I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, my doctor told me to buy a home blood pressure monitor and self monitor my readings each day.

I bought a Omron M4 monitor, see the photo below:

I started out very enthusiastically … for a couple of weeks I was monitoring my blood pressure once or twice a day.

The following chart is a chart of my blood pressure readings since finding out that I have high blood pressure.

You can see the area marked “1″ … march 2004 when I was enthusiastically taking readings.

I forgot to monitor

However the “monitor enthusiasm” soon wore off (the area marked “2″), and for a couple of months I was taking very few readings.

I know it only takes 30 seconds to take a reading, but I think it was part forgetfulness (… I think I also lost my pencil after a while!) The notebook became very grotty, and for whatever reasons I just didn’t take as many reading as I should.

After getting a rap over the knuckles from my doctor for not taking enough readings, I decided to do something about it.

Monitoring Software

I am a software developer and I decided to write some software that would help me monitor my blood pressure. Now even though I work with computers, I am not a terribly organized person … for example I don’t store friend’s birthdays or phone numbers on my computer.

To be useful to me, there had to be a good reason not to use pencil and paper, and that reason is a program could remind me (or more accurately bug me!) to take a reading.

I have been using it since August (area “3″ on the chart above) and as you can see, I have been monitoring my blood pressure more regularly. Not as many as my enthusiastic period, but much better than area “2″.

I keep my blood pressure monitor in the desk draw beside the computer. When the reminder goes off, I pull out the monitor and take the reading. One click of the mouse brings up the “Enter reading” window. The cursor is already in the “systolic” field, so I can immediately type in the systolic reading … press “tab”, type the diastolic reading. press “tab” and then fill in the pulse.

I now don’t have any excuses left not to monitor my blood pressure regularly!