Elderly mum’s surgery cancelled due to high blood pressure in Theatre

[Happydaze2]

It’s a nightmare… GP won’t prescribe medication because as yet no grounds for doing so - she was monitored a few months ago and her BP was fine then so she’s now been asked to do twice -daily home readings for a week then has to wait another couple of weeks for a 24-hour monitor to become available. We strongly suspect her readings will be normal, in which case she will be able to have her procedure rescheduled. But as we also strongly suspect the sudden leap in her BP once in the operating theatre was down to anxiety and stress, isn’t the same thing very likely to happen again? I’m wondering if that is the issue we should be most focused on - her anxiety- and what we can do about it. I can’t believe this is an unusual scenario but not sure how best to deal with it - consult an alternative practitioner such as hypnotherapist perhaps? Would welcome thoughts from anyone who has experience of this.

If they can establish that her anxiety is causing the hypertension, they may be able to prescribe something prior to help her with that. Once she's been monitored, she'll have evidence of her normal state.

She needs to have the 24 hour monitor. And then the anaesthetist can prescribe anti anxiety medication. But without the readings you'd be remiss operating on her with a high bp because the drugs increase bp and the risk of stroke etc increases

It’s a common scenario and most anaesthetists are pretty sensitive to the fact that BPs are usually a bit high in the anaesthetic room. The decision to postpone is not usually taken lightly and depends on things like how high the BP is/what the operation is/how urgent it is/what other medical problems there are/if there’s evidence of damage caused by the high BP. The risk of doing anaesthetic (either GA or spinal) is that if the BP is chronically very high and drops (which it can do quite impressively) then there’s a higher than usual risk of stroke/heart problems/kidney dysfunction. Controlling the BP for a period before surgery can reduce this risk. The balance of risk/benefit is different for each patient and perhaps there were additional things that persuaded the team that postponing to diagnose (or exclude) high BP was safest. Ideally problems like this would get spotted in the pre-op, but sometimes physiology changes, and unfortunately sometimes the process doesn’t go to plan (which is frustrating for everyone). Hope she’s sorted soon.