[ExI] Low Blood Pressure?

[Lee Corbin]

Amara writes

> After a painful night not sleeping well, on the next Tuesday morning, I
> got up and felt a little dizzy. Went to the bathroom, where I felt even
> more dizzy, and so sat for a bit waiting for the dizziness to pass. Then
> I got up and bamm!, I passed out. It was so fast that I didn't know
> where I fell until I woke up a minute later and saw that I was in the
> hall outside of my bathroom. Nothing was broken, only a nasty bump on my
> chin where it hit the hard floor, and I had the knob of the food pantry
> drawer in my hand where I had apparently grabbed it as I went down. The
> two bottles of wine that were standing on the floor next to the pantry
> were only knocked over by my fall, and luckily did not break....

Glad to hear that so far as anyone can tell, it was nothing serious.

Just some ideas:  when you get up, take a short walk inside
pacing up and down and up and down until your blood pressure
is normal.  (And incidentally, blood pressure devices are pretty
cheap---around $30 or so, so you should get one and test yourself
frequently enough to see if you really do tend to have low BP
when you get up).

Needless to say, falling is pretty dangerous. A friend of mine
fell in just the way you describe, and must have landed very
peculiarly and was out for quite a while with very
unfortunate consequences.

Another friend of mine had an idea: heused to reach over and
take a caffeine tablet whenever the alarm clock went off.  After
a while, he felt like getting out of bed  :-)  I believe that caffeine
raises blood pressure.

Lee