How will I die? Heart attack, stroke, or cancer caused by my blood-pressure medication?

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Around the time that I turned 30, my doctor gave me the bad news. My blood pressure was 120 over 90, borderline, and he would need to put me on a preventative form of treatment to keep hypertension at bay. My jaw dropped. “How could this happen? I eat well. I exercise. I’m not overweight. I feel great (most of the time). Why me?” He explained that because of hereditary factors — my mother suffers from high blood pressure — as well as my race (blacks are more likely to develop it than whites), there was nothing I could do to prevent this day from arriving. It was my destiny to officially be at higher than normal risk for a stroke or developing heart disease.

He put me on a treatment plan of 25 milligrams of Atenolol daily. Atenolol is a diuretic, and the side effects were mild. (Bear with me. Some of my medical assertions in this post might be off. I’m not a doctor, just a concerned patient.) Aside from having to go to the bathroom more frequently, the biggest hassle was remembering to take the pill every day. But this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life, so I sucked it up and kept popping them.

The drug worked. It kept my blood pressure down at a normal level, and I continued to enjoy excellent health. I rarely get colds. I’ve never had the flu. I’ve only broken one bone in my life — my thumb, when I caught a ball flying toward me at a particularly high velocity while playing kick ball in fourth grade. But there are three things I do have to deal with: One is panic disorder, a struggle in progress which I will save for another post. I also have terrible seasonal allergies. Back when I lived in the U.S., I took Actifed daily. My doctor told me that it was perfectly safe to do so, but I always wondered if it was actually contributing to the heart attack just waiting to strike me down.

Since moving to Buenos Aires, where Actifed is not sold, I’ve been using a nose spray called Dexalergin. It doesn’t dry out my mouth, make me drowsy or induce fear of a lurking heart attack. And best of all, it’s more effective than Actifed ever was.

I also suffer from migraines and tense nervous headaches. When I was 8, I spent a week in the hospital having tests done because my mother couldn’t understand why a third-grader was having headaches on an almost daily basis. The battery of tests came back normal. I was fine. I’d just have to learn to live with the pain in my head.

With age, the headaches got worse, and later, they developed into migraines. I can function with a migraine. Once the visual disturbance passes — and I was terrified the first time I experienced one, as I was walking down the streets of Florence, Italy, and the world suddenly became blurry and diagonal — I can usually get by. But I asked my doctor in Buenos Aires if there are any preventative precautions I can take. He prescribed Propranolol, a non-selective beta blocker used to treat hypertension as well as migraines. (Atenolol, a beta blocker, does not reach the brain in high enough volumes to affect migraines.) There are catches to both of these blood-pressure medications, of course. Among them, I am now at even higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes, which happens to run in my family and from which I have thankfully been spared up to now.

So far, so good. My physical health, in the words of my physician in Buenos Aires, is “impeccable.” I recently took a heart stress test in order to receive certification to join my current gym. The gym doctor was shocked by the results. He said that they were the best he’s seen in his entire career. Considering the level of exercise that I do — intense pilates twice a week, weekly weight training, running around the city or hitting the treadmill at the gym at least five days a week — I’d better be in good shape.

The headaches have even downgraded from frequent to occasional. But then yesterday I got more bad news: Some blood-pressure pills might be linked to cancer. Although mine was not specifically mentioned, the hypochondriac in me can’t help but wonder if vital information is being left out. Or if a few years from now, they’ll discover that I’ve been slowing killing myself for a decade, first with Atenolol, then Propranolol.

I’m trying not to think about it too much, and I’m going to look into completely weaning myself off all blood-pressure medication. Every day there seems to be a link between some seemingly harmless thing and serious illness. Just waking up in the morning can kill you. A part of me will continue to live in daily fear of the impending heart attack or stroke or cancer diagnosis that will eventually put me out of commission. But in general, I enjoy life, resolving to let death, when it eventually does come, take me completely by surprise.