Some of those characters look the way my BP drugs make me feel most of the time.
Well, make sure you keep your distance. You saw what happened to Cpl. Hicks in Aliens.
Stranger
Not having static, but rather having the amount that we do.
I’m trying to figure out if there could be a connection. That’s why I am looking for people who are in my situation.
[The most common form of high blood pressure - ‘essential hypertension’ - has a very strong genetic link. Simply put, it runs in families.
[/quote]
I am aware of that, but nobody in my family has ever had high blood pressure the way we do. Everybody else in the family with it has been able to control it with a minimum of medication.
With a biology degree, I know something about genetics. As a scientist I also know to look for things that are out of the norm and try to figure them out by looking for patterns.
I’m currently on Clonidine, Minoxidil, Toperol, Furosemide and Lisinopril. My mother has been on all of these and at at one time or another also ones like Carvedilol, Hydralazine and Norvasc.
You could start by trying to understand the scientific method.
Did you read the article? Unless Bill comes back to post you’re going to be met with a tremendous amount of skepticism. He takes a more balanced view on subjects like this. You should read the entire article and look at some of the links provided there. I am not endorsing anything, but you asked about this subject and Bill has provided information you’re not likely to find on this board.
It is clear that you are more alkaline, and the lightening charged your system.
You could describe it as an alkaline Energizer.
Be glad you don’t have an imbalance of Lithium Ions. Tends to be stronger and longer lasting.
Splash sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss GAH! I knew i should’ve hit the close door button sooner!
No. Once again, electrostatic charge doesn’t work that way. At all. Not even close.
What you are describing are basically electrostatic super-powers. Normal humans can build up a charge of several thousand volts. If the air is very dry, they might get up to 20,000 to 40,000 volts. Even under the best of conditions, maybe up to 80,000 volts.
If you touch something metal with that big of a charge on your body, you can actually see the arc (it’s basically a miniature lightning bolt). Electric charge can jump about one centimeter for every 20,000 volts or so, so the most fully charged human being might be able to affect objects a few inches away from them, at most.
The human body also has only a very tiny capacity to store electric charge, so even though the voltage might be very high, the total energy stored on your body is very small. That’s why you can discharge thousands of volts through your fingertip and not get anything more than a very tiny burn at the most, and usually even the most painful of arcs doesn’t actually burn your skin significantly.
You claim to be able to affect street lights, which are probably several yards away from you, and the amount of energy required to affect a street light is many orders of magnitude greater than what the human body can store.
Essentially, this is basically the equivalent of someone saying that they have a water balloon, and when they walk down the street with it, they put out fires the size of a city block from half a mile away with it. First of all, you can’t throw a water balloon a half a mile, and second of all, it doesn’t contain anywhere near enough water to put out a fire the size of a city block.
Similarly, any electrostatic charge on your body is too far away and far too weak to affect a streetlight.
Also, horrible acid reflux only means you have a bit of acid in your stomach and it is coming up into your esophagus. Elsewhere in your body, there’s no acid imbalance at all. As for what acid actually has to do with electricity, acid is a primary component in a lot of batteries. But it’s not the only component, and the acid itself isn’t some sort of electricity holder. Basically, if you have two dissimilar metals and some sort of acidic liquid between them, you create a battery. A car battery is lead and lead oxide, with a mix of sulfuric acid and water in between them. Shove a penny (copper) into one side of a lemon and a dime (zinc) into the other, and you’ve created a very, very, very weak battery. With just the acid alone though, nothing. Lemons don’t routinely discharge miniature lightning bolts in your supermarket’s produce aisle.
As for the lightning bolt that you think caused all of this, it hit the tree, then most likely did one of two things. Either it jumped from the tree to the house and went through your home’s electrical circuits (lightning already jumped through several miles of open air, so jumping another little bit is no biggie for voltages that insanely high), or it went through the tree, into the ground, and came up through your home’s electrical ground system. Either way, lightning can cause huge amounts of damage to your home’s electrical system and electrical devices.
As for you and your mother, your bodies might have charged up a bit. That charge would have quickly dissipated into the surrounding air. You might have had some small charge remaining on your body, but you probably had some small charge on your body already just from walking around your house. Either way, as soon as you took a bath or a shower, all of the charge on your body went through the water, down the water pipe, and into the earth, completely discharging you. Any charge from the lightning bolt plus any charge you might have otherwise accumulated during the day was GONE. Period.
Your blood pressure is seriously out of whack. But I’m an electrical engineer, not a doctor. I can tell you with absolute certainty that your understanding of static charge is seriously flawed, but I can’t tell you why your blood pressure is so screwy.
Chiming in a little.
Blood pressure management is still something of a black art for refractory cases. A friends of mine’s son was the go-to guy in a major hospital here for some time for such things. He seems to have the knack for working with seriously ill patients and crafting a regime that got their pressure under control. There is a very nasty problem of “you can’t there from here” in some patients. Basically they are so out of whack that therapy for one part of the problem will make another part worse, and either way they die.
The problem is that when things go out of control the system behaves chaotically. There is no real mystery about this. Why is more mysterious, probably mostly because there can be many underlying reasons. One of the surprising things about some more contemporary findings about human genetics and biology is that, inside, our chemical pathways differ a lot more than people thought they would. A drug that works in one person may simply not work at all in another, or have bad side effects. Not due to anything bad about the drug, but simply because the assumption that everyone worked with pretty much exactly the same pathways isn’t always true. Of course one thing that will often run true is a familial link in such variations. These things make some doctor’s live difficult, and some patients live’s miserable.
This isn’t forum to discuss medication - but as a general rule - anyone on such a large cocktail of drugs needs to have a ground up review of just what it is they are on and why. There is an unfortunate phenomenon in prescribing where drugs seem to just get added, and never removed fro the gamut, not always with a happy outcome.
To re-iterate engineer_comp_geek’s comment. What you describe in terms of static electricity effects causing street lights to flicker would require comic book like superpowers. You are describing effects that we would need to craft seriously powerful machines that need significant energy resources to power in order to operate and perform their task. These are energy levels that would kill you trivially if they were actually coursing though you. Not just fall over dead, but crispy cooked dead.
Lightning is a seriously powerful force, and if you had actually been struck you cold easily have noticeable impairment - however these are usually mental in nature. But a nearby strike that wrecks in-house electrical gear isn’t nearly so bad. My brother’s house was struck - and the phone next to his bed lit up the entire room as it fried. He is fine. Good story to tell. Another colleague of mine had most of the valuable electronics in his house destroyed in a strike. (Insurance company really had a bad day). Again, despite massive damage, no ill effects to the occupants.
It sounds as if you both definitely have difficult to control high blood pressure. That said, it’s not a particularly rare situation.
Sometimes ‘difficult to control BP’ is a sign of an underlying secondary cause of high blood pressure, e.g. pheochromocytoma, renal artery stenosis, Cushing’s Syndrome, and others. I will assume you’ve both been checked for those conditions.
Sometimes hypertension seems refractory because the patient is taking other meds which raise the blood pressure, e.g. OTC cold remedies (e.g. Otrivin), NSAIDs (e.g. Advil, ibuprofen).
Sometimes the pressure is spuriously elevated. For example, if a person’s arm is too big for the cuff being used, the recorded pressure will be higher than it really is. Another example of ‘spurious’ elevation is present when the artery wall is stiff and rigid. In that case, the problem isn’t high pressure within the artery so much as the high pressure it takes to compress the artery.
And, as you no doubt are aware, some people have BP that is very sensitive to psychological (and other) stress. ‘White coat hypertension’ is a prototype.
The list goes on . . . obesity, alcohol use, cocaine and meth ingestion, salt sensitive individuals who continue to ingest salt, drug withdrawal, . . . all those things, and more, can make the BP refractory or difficult to control.
Have you and your daughter ruled out all these known causes before pursuing a novel, if not unique mechanism to account for your (not uncommon) problem of requiring multiple antihypertensive medications and even then not achieving good BP control?
I wonder if a person with a condition that caused them to have little or no skin oils and sweat glands that did not function, could have a much larger problem with static electricity?
Don’t know if such conditions can exist in a person.
By the way, the next time your hair is standing up like this, I want you to go to your kitchen or bathroom and touch any metal part on the faucet, and let us know what happens.
Dry skin combined with certain types of clothing materials does increase the static charge that you generate when moving around.