Five years ago, after a heart attack, I bought a simple manual kit for
taking my own blood pressure, an inflatable cuff with an aneroid
pressure meter, and a stethoscope. That was before I discovered I was
diabetic, which was three years later. I checked that I got the same
kind of figures as my doc, although I was disappointed that trying to
be much more relaxed than the hurried tests my doc would give me in
his office didn't seem to get me lower readings.

It's quite awkward taking your own blood pressure with a stethoscope,
trying to hold the meter in a readable position while controlling the
deflation of the cuff. However, I got the same results as those my doc
got using a stethoscope and a mercury sphygmanometer, which were
around 145/80 mmHg. The palaver of doing this test has stopped me
taking my blood pressure as often as I'd like, so when I saw a special
sale offer of what looked a like a good quality upper-arm cuff
automatic meter I bought one. Instead of using sound, it uses the
pressure wobbles caused by the heart beat, i.e. the oscillometric as
opposed to the auscultation method.

At first I was very pleased to note that I was consitently getting a
lower BP than the last time I tested, a year ago. I was getting about
139/74 with the new meter. But how did it calibrate against the old
method? A long comparison in which I took about a dozen readings with
each one in carefully standardised conditions suggested to me that the
new automatic meter was under-reading both measurements by about 6
mmHg. So it looked as though my BP was, as it had been before, stable.

Then I discovered that fiddling with the manual kit as though I was
taking a reading with it, while in fact taking a reading with the
automatic, actually raised by blood pressure by very vaguely about
5 mmHg. Hm!

So my best guess is that my BP might be slightly better than I thought
it was, and in the last five years hasn't changed. So far so good. Now
I can measure it more easily -- and consistently (the automatic meter
is a bit more consistent) the next task is to lower it. More
cardiovascular exercise is what I'm going to try. I'm 63 yrs old, with
a BMI of 21.

The meter is the Digital Blood Pressure Monitor, model H888JF, Health
& Life Co. Ltd, Taiwan, currently 20 pounds from Maplins.