I think part of my problem is actually I do feel very well, so I can very easily start racing around and then realise I shouldn’t be. I’m not sure if I may get slightly more tired, slightly less energy than a lot of people of my age, but I think there are no obvious symptoms.

Palpitations are horrible because the heart beats so fast and it’s quite irregular, it’s jumping here and jumping there and then it flutters and then it goes away and then comes back again. It’s not very pleasant, especially if you’re lying down and you want to go to sleep, and you hear that thumping in your head and you can’t get rid of it.

I also used to suffer from migraines for years and years and I often thought afterwards that I wonder if that was anything to do with blood pressure before I knew about it. I had them for 20 something years, dreadful ones where I used to have an injection for it sometimes and about every month, or every 5 weeks, I would not be able to go to work because my head was dreadful. I feel theres a lot of pressure there that needs to disperse but it won’t, it just hangs about there. And I think when you get to bed and you can’t lie on either side because this thumping goes on and on, and so you eventually lay on your back, and then once you turn over it starts all over again.

I have had three mini strokes, and when my husband was alive- I can’t remember when this happened- but about 5 years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and I found I was hanging over the bed. I didn’t know at that time that I’d been unconscious so I couldn’t get myself to move, I couldn’t get myself to think or anything and that’s not like me.

Whenever I walk I am totally breathless because of the hypertension. I now suffer from left sided hemiopia as they call it, because the optic nerve has been damaged by the hypertension. Due to the hypertension, my eyes have started to haemorrhage at the back. So my eyesight is getting bad as well. Also because I have now gone bilaterally deaf, this could also be a cause of the hypertension.

I don’t suffer with headaches, I haven’t had a headache for many years now. What I have suffered in the past is a pain in the neck. And I was told that could be stress related and not necessarily the blood pressure. But the things I do tend to push the pressure up. I think I know when my pressure is actually going up. Although I don’t suffer from business or anything like that I can feel this pain and something tells me ‘Slow down a little bit.

Sometimes I can feel the heart beating which is a bit of a nuisance. Sometimes – I don’t know if this is a symptom – I’m sweating, and I’m not talking about the weather when it’s hot but sometimes I perspire when I shouldn’t be perspiring. I know that’s one of the tell tale signs if you’re about to have a heart attack so it’s a bit worrying. Sometimes dizziness occasionally, walking somewhere or doing something. I used to have much more of that dizziness when I was walking, especially after I got out of hospital. I’d be just walking somewhere or just sitting down working on a computer or something and then all of a sudden I’m overcome by dizziness and it would just go away after a few minutes. I don’t have as much of that as before I had, but occasionally I do get that.

Strangely enough even though we talk about high blood pressure I never thought about it. I had sometimes a slight pain in the back of my head. Somebody told me, perhaps one of the doctors, that it might be one of the symptoms of high blood pressure when you get this pain. I think it seems to be true in a sense – I notice that whenever I’m a bit more excited or there are situations that my blood pressure probably goes up, I get a pain in the back.

It’s very difficult from time to time, if ones got hypertension, not to relate symptoms to it. Every time that I get a headache – although I have read some literature which suggests that headaches and hypertension are not necessarily associated – every time I do get a headache, and I am quite a headachy kind of person in the first place, I tend to think ‘oh it’s my blood pressure.

I do think there are different types of headache and I think I have now begun to recognise if I haven’t taken my tablets for a bit if I sometimes do get a headache that I will think ‘Ah that is a hypertension headache.

That’s because I haven’t taken my tablets but I don’t check my blood pressure and associate directly with the headache. I have always suffered with migraine and cyclical headaches. The cyclical headaches have tended to go away, but now I do think I get probably something to do with the hypertension, because certainly when I am taking my tablets I get less headaches.