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My Cardiologist Looked at My Bloodwork Last March and Asked Me a Question I Couldn't Answer. "Marjorie. How Long Have You Been Holding Your Breath?" I'm 67. I'm a retired ICU nurse. I worked at a hospital in a midsize Midwestern city for thirty-eight years. I retired in 2022 at sixty-four. I'd planned to retire at sixty-six, but the last two years of my career had taken something out of me that I didn't fully understand until I'd been retired for a while. I want to write down what happened to my blood pressure in the year after I retired, and what I did about it, because I think there are women like me — women who spent their working lives taking care of other people and never quite learned how to take care of themselves — who might benefit from reading it. I want to be careful, though. I want to tell you the truth and not a tidy version of it. The truth has more edges. I'll back up. My blood pressure had been a thing on my chart since 2014. That was the year my husband Earl died. He was sixty-two. He'd had a heart attack at a hardware store on a Saturday morning. He was looking at lawn mower belts. He was dead before the ambulance got there. I want to tell you that I am writing about Earl because Earl is part of the story of my blood pressure, but I am not going to dwell on him because dwelling is not what this is for. I will say this: Earl and I were married thirty-four years. We had two kids. He was a good man. I miss him every day. I have learned to carry the missing. I was fifty-six when Earl died. My blood pressure went up about ten points in the year after his death. My doctor at the time — a young woman named Dr. Park — sat me down and told me she wanted to start me on a low dose. I said I'd think about it. I didn't start it. I told myself the bloodwork was high because I was grieving. I told myself that once the grieving was over, the bloodwork would come back down. The grieving was not over for about three years. By the time it was, my blood pressure was higher than it had been, not lower. Dr. Park had retired by then. My new doctor, Dr. Khan, had the same conversation with me. He recommended a low dose. I said I'd think about it. I didn't start it. I told myself I'd work on it through lifestyle. I'd walk more. I'd eat less salt. I'd lose ten pounds. I did some of those things. Not enough. By 2020 — the year COVID hit, the year I was 62 and working twelve-hour shifts in the ICU — my blood pressure was high enough that Dr. Khan was no longer asking. He was telling me. He said: "Eleanor. You're a nurse. You know what these numbers mean. I need you to start the medication. I'm worried about you." I told him I'd think about it. I didn't start it. I want to tell you why I didn't start it, because if I don't tell you why I didn't start it the rest of this isn't going to make sense. I didn't start it because I was a nurse. I had spent thirty-six years at that point watching other people take medications they didn't fully understand. I had watched other people get put on a low dose of one thing, then a low dose of another thing to manage the side effects of the first thing, then a third thing to manage the side effects of the second thing, then end up on six pills they couldn't keep track of. I had told myself, somewhere around year fifteen of nursing, that I was never going to be one of those people. I was going to be the nurse who didn't take pills. Who managed her own body. Who held the line. I want to be honest with you that the holding the line was not really about pills. The holding the line was about being the one in charge. I had spent my whole working life being in charge. Being the person other people came to. Being the steady one. Being the one who knew. Taking a pill, in some quiet part of myself, felt like admitting that I wasn't the steady one anymore. I have a lot to say about that, looking back. I'm not going to say all of it. I will say this: I was wrong. I was wrong for a long time. I retired in March of 2022. The retirement itself was a kind of relief. I'd been at the hospital since 1984. The work had become harder in the last few years — harder physically, harder emotionally — and the COVID years had taken something out of me I wasn't sure I'd ever get back. I retired on a Friday. I packed up my locker. I had cake with the day-shift nurses. I cried a little. I drove home. By the following Wednesday I was bored. By the following month I was — and I want to choose this word carefully — irritated. Irritated at the house. Irritated at my own routine. Irritated at the woman in the mirror who was suddenly a retired person and didn't know what to do with herself. My kids — Jeff and Megan, both in their late thirties — checked on me a lot the first few months. I told them I was fine. I told them I was enjoying not setting an alarm. I was not enjoying not setting an alarm. I want to tell you what my year looked like, because if you've been a working woman for forty years and you're approaching retirement, somebody should tell you this. The first year of retirement, for a woman who has been a working professional her whole adult life, can be a particular kind of hard. It is hard not because there is nothing to do. It is hard because there is no longer a structure that tells you who you are. For thirty-eight years I had been Eleanor the ICU nurse. In April of 2022 I became Eleanor. Eleanor is a woman I had not really met yet. I started doing things that were probably bad for my blood pressure. I was on my couch a lot. I was watching too much news. I was eating more than I needed to and not paying attention to it. I had stopped my regular walks because I'd been telling myself for years that I walked enough at work. Now I wasn't at work, and I was still telling myself I walked enough. I was not walking enough. I was drinking more wine in the evening than I'd ever drunk in my life. Not a lot. But more. Two glasses on weeknights. Three on Sundays. I want to be specific about the wine because the wine is the kind of thing women my age don't talk about, and we should. The wine was a way of marking time. It was a way of making 6 p.m. feel different from 4 p.m. It was a way of having a thing at the end of the day that meant the day was over. When you've been a shift worker for forty years and your day no longer ends, the wine is a way to make a day end. It worked. It also raised my blood pressure. By the spring of 2023 — my first full year of retirement — I had not had a checkup since 2021. I was a retired nurse who had not been to her own doctor in two years. I was avoiding it. I knew the numbers were going to be bad. I didn't want to see them. I didn't want Dr. Khan to look at me over his glasses and ask me, again, why I wasn't taking the medication. So I didn't go. The thing that made me go was Megan. Megan is my daughter. She's 38. She's a physical therapist. She's married, two kids. She lives an hour away from me. She came over one Sunday in February of last year. We were sitting at my kitchen table. She'd brought her two kids — Ben who's seven and Lila who's four — and they were in my living room watching something on the iPad. Megan looked at me across the table. She said: "Mom. When was your last checkup." I said: "I'm fine." She said: "That's not what I asked." I said: "It's been a while." She said: "How long is a while." I said: "I don't remember." She said: "Mom." I said: "I haven't been since before I retired." She put her coffee cup down. She said: "Mom. You're a nurse. You know how this works. You know what happens when women your age stop going." I said: "Megan. I know." She said: "Then why." I said: "Because I'm tired." I want to tell you that I didn't mean physically tired. I meant tired in a way I had not been able to put into words until I said it out loud at my kitchen table to my daughter that Sunday afternoon. I was tired of being responsible. I had been responsible for other people's bodies my entire working life. I had been responsible for my husband's body for thirty-four years. I had been responsible for my children's bodies for thirty-eight years. I had been responsible for my own body the whole time too. I was tired of being responsible. I had wanted, somewhere in me, for someone else to take the responsibility for a while. For someone else to tell me what to do and have me say okay and not have to think about it. That's not how it works. I know that. But that's how I had been feeling for about a year. I told Megan some version of that at the kitchen table. Megan listened. She said: "Mom. I'm going to come with you to your appointment." I said: "You don't have to." She said: "I know I don't have to. I'm going to." She called Dr. Khan's office on Monday morning from her car on the way to work. She put me on speakerphone. She had me make the appointment for two weeks later. She came with me. The appointment was a Wednesday in early March of last year. Dr. Khan came into the room. He greeted me. He looked at Megan. He recognized her as my daughter from years of family photographs I'd shown him. He said: "Eleanor. It's been a while." I said: "It has." He said: "Let's see what's going on." He took my blood pressure. He took it twice — once at the start of the appointment, once at the end. He didn't tell me the numbers. He said: "I want to run a full panel today. I want to do bloodwork. I want to do an EKG. I want you to come back next week and we'll talk." I went home with Megan that afternoon. We had dinner at my house. She stayed for a few hours and then drove back. She called me Thursday morning. She said: "Mom. Did he tell you the numbers." I said: "No." She said: "Did you ask." I said: "No." She said: "Mom." I said: "I'll find out next week." She didn't push. She has learned, my daughter, when to push and when not to. I went back the following Wednesday