Keep taking the medicine!

Had an interesting telephone conversation today with a lady who hadn’t been taking any of her angina medicines for the past month because she had been ‘too busy’ to re-order them on repeat.

She had started to get headaches and so went to get her BP checked by the practice nurse. Needless to say her BP was very high, but she hadn’t told the nurse that she had stopped her medicines and had just gone home and re-started them all.

She felt so ill after doing this that she had stopped them all again and rang me for advice.

I explained to her that because she had completely stopped them all for some time, that she would need to slowly titrate most of the doses back up again.

I also persuaded her to tell her doctor since he was the only one who could monitor her and advise her on how to correctly re-start all her medicines.