I would break into sweat. Not a glistening sheen but rolling drops down the side of my face. My back would soak through my shirt. It didn’t matter that room was air conditioned or that it was a Ventura winter day of fifty degrees. Anyone who looked at me would assume that I was crossing the Mohave in the teeth of summer.
My physician, a strikingly beautiful Italian woman whose calm green eyes and lilting accent I can still remember clearly, told me that I was having a ‘thyroid storm’. It’s a condition where the thyroid gland goes crazy and starts over producing hormones. The sweats were the spikes in production. She scheduled me for tests and prescribed Inderal, a blood pressure medication, saying that it would reduce the symptoms.
My girlfriend at the time and I had a good sex life. It was a long distance relationship and we enjoyed, no, needed it to be that way. So it wasn’t a happy event when the desire was there, but the ability to perform suddenly wasn’t. She was confused, I was embarrassed. Basically uncool all around.
When I called my doctor, she breezily reported that it was a side effect of the medication. I told her, “Great, find another treatment.” Within a week, we had me sorted out and on different medication that didn’t have the same ‘side effects’.
Fast forward seven years. I’m with a different doctor. The nurse has taken my blood pressure. The reading was the same as it had been since my twenties, near the top of the normal range. I didn’t think anything of it until the doctor came with a stern look. “You’ve got high blood pressure. It’s not too bad, but I’m going to prescribe some medication for it.”
I protested that my blood pressure, while elevated, had been rock steady for twenty-five years. She explained that the blood pressure ranges had been lowered because the old ones didn’t provide as much safety for patients. My numbers put me in the new ‘pre-hypertensive’ category while in the United Kingdom, my numbers are still, to this day, considered perfectly normal and not requiring treatment.
I asked if there were other things I could do besides taking an erection killing blood pressure pill. “Well,” the doctor said, “people say they are going to eat better and exercise, but they don’t. Then things get worse. Better to just take the meds and nip this in the bud.” With that she handed me a script for a medication I had no intention of filling.
I got home and pouted about my lot, probably raising my blood pressure even more. I was watching TV. I heard the words, “This is Bob. He’s got a new spring in step…” I looked up and saw that insipid, ‘I can get hard anytime I want’ smile hawking ‘Enzite’ a miracle boner pill. As the days went by, I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t some kind of Oliver Stone type rigging going on. Follow this for a second:
Say you were a pharmaceutical company and you wanted to make more money. You’ve got a pill to rollout that will transform a flaccid crank into a shaft of steel. You want to make sure that you will have enough customers. You make several studies that create a malady called ‘Metabolic Syndrome’, that is actually not well defined (see American Heart Association website, for example) and you move the acceptable blood pressure numbers down.
Now, some poor Joe comes in for a physical. The blood pressure is in the ‘pre-hypertensive’ range. The physician prescribes blood pressure medication. Mr. Happy takes a vacation.
The sudden ability to not perform raises anxiety and blood pressure, further justifying the need for the medicine that sent your little buddy into exile. But wait, the doctor can offer you salvation. Viva Viagra!! You’re back in the saddle, but this time you can keep up until your wife or girlfriend retreats to a locked bathroom to get away from you.
Did the pharmaceutical companies lower the blood pressure ranges to create a market of limp men who would clamor for their new erectile dysfunction medication? I don’t know, but it’s an awfully strange coincidence.
And my blood pressure? It hasn’t moved.
Dispatches From The Front 