To take my blood pressure monitor off?

[VeryGoodVeryNice]

I have to wear a blood pressure monitor for 24 hours, I’ve had it on since 3pm.

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of one of these, it’s not like getting your blood pressure done at the doctors, it is a lot tighter and actually painful, and if you’re not perfectly still it will keep trying multiple times, getting tighter each time, to the point where I’ve been getting a loss of sensation/pins and needles feeling in my hand.

It will go off every hour between now and 7am, then every 30 mins after that. My readings are all sky-high, I know it’s important to keep it on but I am most definitely not going to be able to sleep through wearing this. Getting woken up every hour is going to be a nightmare, I have 2 health conditions which this is going to really mess with. I have chronic fatigue and if I don’t get a good night’s sleep it will make my symptoms a lot worse, for days/weeks, making my life even more unmanageable. And I also have PTSD and unexpected happenings in the night are my worst trigger for this (due to crazy ex and past experience of bad things happening during the night), and if I suddenly get woken up I will go into panic mode and get a surge of adrenaline, and then it will take me ages to settle down again (by which time it won’t be long before the machine goes off again).

I foresee this having a massive knock on effect on me, AIBU to take it off before I sleep?

But won't this help you access treatment that you need? Maybe one rubbish night and some crap days afterwards while you recover are worth it in the long term?

Take it off and ask for a form to complete. You take your own blood pressure twice a day for a week (mornings and evenings) . Then you give the form to the GP. They will take an average reading based on your numbers.
Wearing a 24 hour monitor causes stress anyway, so your blood pressure is likely to be higher than it would normally be.

When I had 24 hour monitoring I ended up taking mine off during the night because at times I felt as though my arm was burning. You can hit the off button to deflate the cuff and then try again a few minutes later. Do what you can and don't worry about it too much. If you can't get enough readings they will ask you to do it twice a day for about 5 days instead.

I took it off, phoned NHS 111 to ask if I should switch the machine off or leave it on (didn’t want it to lose the data it had!). The pharmacist was a bit pissy with me about it but he got the readings that it managed to take and will send those through to the doctors. He said they may come back to him and say I need to do the whole 24 hours but I literally can’t. I don’t think the nighttime readings would really help anyway as my arm suddenly being gripped when I’m asleep would send me into instant panic due to what I’ve been through and an ongoing fear of a certain person, so I would imagine they’d be through the roof.

All the readings taken were very high (all either stage 2 or crisis) but didn’t hear anything from the docs today, which doesn’t surprise me as they’re not exactly on the ball at my surgery usually.