I have worked with special populations in the past. I am very familiar with hypertension and the effects of high blood pressure, as well as the medications that supposedly help treat it. About 90% of the seniors I worked with at the senior center were on some kind of blood pressure medication, or at least a diuretic. I am very comfortable dealing with people with high blood pressure, and recognizing the signs and symptoms that go along with it.
But these days, I work with a relatively low risk population. There are a few people here and there in my gym who I know need to be careful while working out. And if I see them overworking themselves I am very comfortable with knowing when to step in.
This being said, I can continue with my Tuesday Evening Bitch Session.
One lady, let's call her EP's Nightmare, has been taking my classes recently. She got scared of my core class and refused to come back. She almost didn't come back to step until a co-worker of hers agreed to take it with her if she went back. I offered to spend some time with them before class and show them the steps. Co-worker showed up but Nightmare stood us up.
She came in about 3 minutes before my Fit Ball class was supposed to start and asked me if we had blood pressure machine. That question always sounds the alarm in my mind, just from habit. I tell her we don't have a machine but I can take it manually, which is about a million times more accurate. I lead her into the back room and ask her if she's feeling ok. She tells me that her legs, ankles and fingers are all swollen. I ask if she's ever had problems with blood pressure before and she nods.
I take her pressure but there was some movement during the reading and I missed the systolic. I tell her I think it's in the upper 130's over 92 but I want to do it again just to make sure that I didn't mistake a bump for the first sound. So while I'm waiting to do it a second time, I ask her more questions as I pull out her chart (since we were right there). Guess what? Absolutely nothing on the chart about blood pressure issues. I ask if she's on any medication for it. Her response? Sometimes.
What the hell does that mean? Doctors don't prescribe BP medication on an as-needed basis, at least not in my experience. She admits that she's supposed to take it all the time but she doesn't. But she has been taking it for the past few days, since she started to experience the swelling. I ask her why there's nothing on her health history form about the BP and why she didn't list her medication? She kind of looked sheepish and muttered something about it not being a big deal.
NOT A BIG DEAL? If her blood pressure skyrocketed during a step class and she had some kind of cardiac event in my fitness center, how on earth was I going to be able to provide the best possible treatment for her without even knowing she has a blood pressure problem? So because she just didn't want to have to go through the trouble of getting clearance from her physician, she is going to put ME at risk for her having some kind of a heart attack or stroke in MY fitness center and make ME give her CPR and get all stressed out. Then no one's going to want to take my classes anymore because they think they'll die if they do.
Oh, BMore's teaching that? Someone died while taking her class. Maybe we should wait and take bootcamp with Blank Stare outside in the 100 degree weather with 99% humidity in our sweats and moon boots while injecting heroin laced with crack into our veins and then go play in traffic. It's probably safer than taking BMore's class.
Not to mention that without this information from Nightmare, I don't even know to watch out for her. At the senior center, I was lucky enough to know every single person that walked through my doors. I personally went through their applications, their health history, spoke with their doctors, if necessary, and was familiar with every medication they were on. We monitored blood pressure before and after exercise, and I knew everyone's normal range. Even if a blood pressure was "normal" by industry standards, if it was unusual for the individual, that person was questioned.
I now work in a completely different atmosphere so there's no way I could be that intimate with all my members. And I'm sure Nightmare's not the only one to lie on her application to get in quickly. But since she called attention to herself and the fact that she withheld serious information from us when she joined, I'm officially mad.
So my point? When you are joining a gym, or filling out any type of paperwork where they question your health history, don't just take the easy way out and lie. Chances are the facility will never know. This is true. But you are doing yourself a huge disservice. There's a reason that they ask those things, and it's not just to make life difficult for you. I don't like going to the doctor any more than the next person. But working out is not something to be taken lightly. Exercise is stress on your heart. Ideally, it is good stress, but there's a fine line between good stress and the kind of stress that can result in acute MIs and strokes and all that good stuff.
And believe me, you don't want to be the person in the hospital gown that stays open in the back, so you don't strangle yourself when sitting down but at the same time lets your butt cheeks hang out and say good morning to whoever is lucky enough to be behind you; who has a catheter trailing down your leg attached to a big urine pouch that goes everywhere you do. You don't want to be the one who needs people to come into your room every few hours to teach you how to walk again, this time with the oxygen tank strapped over their shoulder and attached to your mouth, then strap you to an ekg monitor and pulse-o-meter to make sure that a stroll to the rest room won't send your heart into a frenzied panic attack resulting in bypass surgery. Then, after the bypass, you don't want to be the one coughing up greenish yellowish mucous with a huge gash down your leg from where they extracted the fresh new blood vessel to transplant into your heart after sawing your ribs in half and prying your chest open, then sewing it shut with metal twine and leaving tubes sticking out to drain all the pus and mucous and other nasty crap out. Hopefully they didn't leave any gauze in you.
Wow. I didn't know I had all that in me.
Yeah. All that from neglecting to mention that you have blood pressure issues on your corporate fitness center application. Sweet Dreams!
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