U is for Aunt Unice

Aunt Eunice was on Mama's side of the family.  I remember her laughing and telling us about a nurse taking her vitals and telling her, "Lady, you're already dead."  I suppose that's where I got my own very low vitals characteristics.

In college, when our biology professor was going over blood pressure, he asked the class to stand.  He then began to give out average blood pressure readings and asked us to sit down when he called out our normal reading.  I was one of the last three to sit.  And this was not a normal size class.  This was a class that met in an auditorium on campus.

Then when I was back home and working out at a gym several times a week, their nurse called me in to check vitals.  My resting heart rate was 60 bpm.  She said, "Oh, how many miles do you run each week?", thinking surely this was because I was doing cardio workouts or running.  I told her, "I don't run unless something is chasing me."

And body temperature.  When I was fine and feeling well, my body temperature was always hovering around 97 degrees instead of 98.6.  At 98.6 I feel feverish and bad.

I ran my extremely low blood pressure through two pregnancies.  The morning I went in to have Bug, c-section, they took my blood pressure before I went to surgery and  even at nine months pregnant it was only 110/70.  While that was up from my normal, it was still well below text book normal.  Then after the c-section they kept getting readings like 148/85 and such.  It never went down!  I don't know what happened to me.  But I have no doubt something that happened during that delivery changed me forever.

Barbara