world health day

It's World Health Day today.. and this year's theme is high blood pressure. This theme seems eerily coincidental to something that had happened recently..

The sudden passing of a classmate of mine made the dangers of  this disease very real. It shocked everyone.
My classmate, a man in his late forties, was not obese nor was he a heavy smoker. He did have a beer belly that was typical for a man his age. And like most of my classmates, he was juggling work, family and studies obligations all at the same time, so to say that he was stressed out was an understatement. Then there was the environmental factor. The temperature here has been fluctuating sharply since February with a daily difference of 10-degree being the norm, which is bad news for anyone with hypertension. According to his wife, my classmate stopped his hypertension medication without consulting his doctors because he thought it was interfering with the medicine he was taking for his cold. Then on that fateful evening, he was found collapsed in his office. He had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and fell into a coma that he never came out of.

have lots of vegetables and fruits daily..

This case may not be an isolate case as people, especially older folks, tend to get complacent when it comes to adhering to their long-term medication regime. In fact, my sister and her colleagues are used to having patients who kept being admitted for not taking their high blood pressure medications, especially after every festivities.

People are living longer thanks to the advancement in medicine, but there's only so much doctors can do. We need to take responsibility for our own health. We can't keep on abusing our bodies, with poor diet, lack of exercise and other dangerous habits, and expect our medical teams to make us healthy instantly with a jab, a pill or a surgery.

So dear friends, do take good care of yourselves.. You live only once..