It’s official. I have hypertension, which is more simply known as high blood pressure.

I finally went to see my doctor yesterday, and found that my blood pressure was a rather alarming 150/93. Now, for the past year or so, I’ve been intermittently checking my blood pressure myself, and it certainly hasn’t been normal, somewhere between 130-140 systolic. Which probably explained the throbbing in my head. Knowing that it was highly unlikely that I would adopt a healthy lifestyle anytime soon, I opted for treatment.

Call it placebo effect, but after I started taking meds, I started feeling a lot better later in the day. I slept better than I’ve slept all week, and I actually woke up half-an-hour before I had to feeling refreshed.

The other thing I discovered was that my alanine transaminase is twice the upper limit of normal. I’m pretty sure it’s not chronic viral hepatitis, nor is it some bizarre genetic disorder. More likely than not, it’s simply chronic burger toxicity (which is facetious medical slang for being a fat-ass.) I am still horrified by the fact that Morgan Spurlock managed to get his jack his transaminases up to the 500s—about 10x the upper limit of normal—by eating McDonald’s only for a month in “Supersize Me”. Even still, it has done little to fix my crappy eating habits.

There is a part of me that feels as fatalistic as ever. Right now, I don’t have any particular reason to want to prolong my life significantly. I figure I should at least make it to fifty, give or take a few years, before suffering a heart attack or stroke. Twenty years still seems like a pretty long time.

And I guess I still haven’t been cured of my depression, really. There is a part of me that still feels that there’s no way things are going to get better, and that it’s all downhill from here anyway. And if the next twenty years are actually going to be worse than the last thirty years, I’m not sure I want to keep going.

Still, there’s something to say about feeling healthier (even if it might be entirely illusory.) The fact that my headache went away after taking my anti-hypertensive meds felt pretty good, as did the fact that I felt pretty well rested.

I’m not looking for guarantees. Realistically, I know that the future is a great big unknown. Both good and bad things are destined to happen, and while I can envision all the bad things—all the things that are inevitable, like sickness and death, failure and defeat—I have no idea how to predict the good things. When I look back at my life, to be truthful, serendipity has been remarkably good to me, and I doubt I could’ve made it this far without such good fortune.

I realize that the Laws of Thermodynamics are misleading. While I’ve tended to see these laws as inevitables, in reality, they’re just statistical truths. While on average, all things tend to fall apart, and disorder eventually wins, the universe is rife with examples where this isn’t true, particularly in the short term. So maybe we can’t escape the fact that the universe will become a cold, lifeless vacuum in fifteen billion years or so, but that probably doesn’t have much bearing on what tomorrow has to bring.