16/06/2026
The nurse at my GP put the cuff on me in August and the reading came out at 192 over 112 and she made me sit there for twenty minutes and did it again and it came out at 188 over 110 and that was the morning I stopped pretending I wasn't going to have a stroke.
I’m 62. I live on my own in a small flat in Blacktown in Sydney’s west, the same place I’ve been in since the divorce went through in 2011. I drove a delivery van for the same company for 31 years until my back gave out in 2022 and they put me on the Disability Support Pension. I’ve got one son, Daniel, who lives in Parramatta with his wife Priya and their little boy Arjun who’s six and the best thing in my life by a country mile.
My brother Stephen died last August. He was 64. They said it was his heart. He was painting his fence on a Saturday afternoon in Penrith and his wife Linda found him on the patio.
He’d had high blood pressure for twenty years.
He was on three tablets for it.
He died anyway.
The funeral was on a Friday two weeks later and I went to the GP the Monday after that because Linda had taken me to one side at the wake and said, "Get yourself checked. I mean it. Don't be him."
That’s when the nurse got the 192 over 112.
She didn't panic. She was very calm. She gave me a glass of water. She said, "Sit there for a bit." She went and got the doctor.
The doctor came in and read the numbers off the screen and looked at me over his glasses and said, "Right. We're going to start you on something today and I'm going to see you again on Thursday."
He put me on 10mg of ramipril and 5mg of amlodipine and he sent me home with a leaflet about strokes that I did not read because I did not need to read it. I’d watched my mum read one in 1997 when my dad had his.
My dad had his stroke at 64.
He lived another four years.
He spent those four years in a chair in the back room of the house in Blacktown with the left side of his face dragged down and his left hand curled up into a claw on his lap, and he could understand everything we said to him but the words he could get out were only ever about a third of the words he was trying to say. He’d get frustrated and his eyes would fill up and he’d hit the arm of the chair with his good hand. He died at 68 and the last thing he ever said to me, on a Sunday afternoon in the back room, was a word that wasn't a word, and I knew what he meant, and I have never forgotten it.
I sat in my flat the night after the nurse got the 192 over 112 and I thought about Arjun.
Arjun is six. If I’m in a chair in a back room of a flat in Blacktown with my face dragged down and one hand curled on my lap, he is not going to want to come and visit. Six-year-olds don’t want to visit grandads who scare them. He’ll come because Daniel and Priya make him come, and he’ll stand in the doorway, and he’ll be polite, and he won’t know what to say to me, and I won’t be able to say anything to him.
That is what I was thinking about. Not dying. The chair.
I want to be honest about what I did next, because the truthful answer is I took the tablets and I did nothing else. I told myself the tablets would do it. The doctor saw me on the Thursday and the reading was 178 over 104. He upped the amlodipine to 10mg. He saw me again two weeks after that and the reading was 168 over 99. He added bisoprolol.
Three tablets. Stephen had been on three tablets. Stephen had died on three tablets.
I was on the same three tablets and my numbers were still sitting in the 160s over 95 on a good morning and I knew, in the way you know things, that I was walking the same path my brother had walked and my dad before him.
The doctor sat me down at the third appointment and he was very kind about it but he said the words I’d been waiting for. He said, "John, the tablets are doing what they can. The weight has to come off. The weight is what's driving this. Even 12 or 13 kilos would make a real difference. I can refer you to a dietician."
I’d been to a weight management program in 2019. Twelve weeks of group sessions in a community hall in Mount Druitt with a clipboard and a set of scales and a woman telling us about portion sizes. I lost 4 kilos in twelve weeks and put 6 back on inside six months.
I told the doctor I’d think about it.
I went home and I didn't think about it. I sat in my flat for three weeks waiting for the second heart attack in the family to find me, except this time it wasn’t a heart attack I was waiting for. It was the stroke. I’d lie in bed at night and I’d feel my pulse in my chest and I’d think, is that it, is that what it feels like just before, would I even know.
What changed it was an email.
Priya, my daughter-in-law, had been sending me bits and bobs since Stephen died. Articles she thought I might like, mostly about gardening because she knows I sit out the back when the weather’s decent. About three weeks after my third doctor’s appointment she sent me an email with a link to a long article she’d come across the night before. She said she’d thought of me when she read it. She didn’t push it. She didn’t go on about it. She just sent it.
I opened it on the Sunday morning sitting at the kitchen table with my tea.
It was about high blood pressure in men over 50. About why the tablets stop working past a certain point. About what’s actually driving the readings, which is not salt the way they tell you and not stress the way they tell you, but what happens to the body’s engine after 50, and what that engine does to your circulation. About fat round the middle pressing on things and telling the body to hold onto salt and water and squeeze the blood vessels tighter, and how that’s why the BP creeps up no matter what tablets they stack on you. The tablets manage the symptom. They don’t fix the engine.
Then the article talked about a tea that’s been drunk in a part of the world I’ve never been to, for hundreds of years, that works on that engine. Not a slimming pill. A cup of tea, twice a day. And it said that men over 50 had been losing 15 to 25 kilos on it without changing what they ate, and their blood pressure had been dropping with the weight in a way the tablets alone never managed.
I read it twice. I sat there for a long time. Then I read it again.
I’ll be honest, the only reason I tried it is because Stephen was dead and my dad had spent four years in a chair and I was scared. If Stephen had still been alive I’d probably have shut the laptop and gone and made a bacon sandwich. I’m not telling you I’m a man who’s good at making decisions. I’m telling you fear made one for me.
I ordered the tea off the link that afternoon.
The packet arrived on the Wednesday. I drink it in the morning with my breakfast and I drink it again at about 7 in the evening when I’d normally be having a snack in front of the telly.
The snack thing went first. By the end of the first week I’d stopped reaching for biscuits at night. Not because I was forcing myself. Because I wasn’t hungry.
End of the first month I was down 11 kilos and my morning home BP was 148 over 88.
End of the second month I was down 23 kilos and my BP was 132 over 81.
End of the third month I was 85 kilos and my BP this morning was 124 over 76.
My GP brought me back in last week to take me off the bisoprolol completely. We’re talking about coming down on the amlodipine in another month if the numbers hold. He said, and I am quoting him, "I have never seen a turnaround like this in someone your age in twenty-two years of practice."
I have lost 37 kilos.
I am lighter than I was on my wedding day in 1986.
I don’t lie awake at night feeling my pulse in my chest. I don’t wake up with the dull headache behind the eyes that I had every single morning for two years and assumed was just what 62 feels like. I don’t see the chair in the back room anymore when I think about Arjun.
I went round to Daniel’s last Sunday. Arjun was on the floor with his Lego. I got down on the floor with him. I sat there for forty minutes. I got up by myself.
I haven’t told you something else about my dad that I should tell you now.
The week before his stroke, my mum says, he had a headache for three days and didn’t tell anyone. He went to bed early on the Thursday and said his head was banging. He woke up on the Friday and couldn’t move his arm.
I have spent the last year assuming I was going to wake up on a Friday morning and not be able to move my arm.
I’m not assuming that anymore.
I’ve put the link to the article Priya sent me in the comments under this post. Same one. Word for word. I didn’t write it. I just read it and tried what it said.
If your blood pressure has been quietly running you towards the chair in the back room the way mine was, have a read of it.
You haven’t got fourteen years to waste.
I didn’t think I had fourteen years either, and I’m still here.
