My Blood Pressure Reading Scared Me More Than My Father's Funeral Did

The machine at the pharmacy

It was one of those free blood pressure machines you sit at in the corner of a pharmacy, the kind nobody takes seriously.

I was in the Johannesburg pharmacy to buy plasters for my daughter, who had grazed her knee, and I sat down at the machine while I waited for the queue to go down, more out of boredom than anything. I put my arm in the cuff. It squeezed. It thought about it. And then it showed me a number in red, and next to the number a little unhappy face, and it told me to consult a doctor.

I laughed it off. Cheap machine. Probably broken. Everyone knows those things are useless.

But I went to my actual doctor that week, because my daughter's grazed knee had reminded me that I was somebody's father and could not afford to be stupid, and the doctor's proper machine said the same thing the pharmacy one had. My blood pressure was too high. For a man of thirty-five, worryingly so.

Why it frightened me more than the funeral

Here is the thing that is hard to explain. My father died of a heart attack when I was nineteen. I had stood at his funeral dry-eyed, because at nineteen I did not really understand what had happened, and death was still a thing that happened to other people's fathers even when it was mine.

Sitting in that doctor's room at thirty-five, with a daughter of my own waiting at home, I understood it completely and for the first time, and it frightened me more than the funeral ever had. Because now I could see it. I could see her at nineteen, dry-eyed at my funeral, not understanding, the way I had not understood. And I could see exactly how a man gets there. A desk. A car. Long hours. Takeaways at the wheel. A body treated as a thing that carries your head to work and nothing more.

I had become my father, right on schedule, and I had two decades on the same track and no intention of finishing the journey.

The friend who would not let it go

I told one friend. His name is Sipho, and we have known each other since school, and he is the kind of friend who does not offer sympathy, he offers a lift.

He phoned me the next morning at five and said he was outside. I said outside where. He said outside my house, to take me to the gym, and that I could either come down or he would sit and hoot until my whole street knew my business.

I went down. In the dark. In the cold. Furious.

That became the routine. Half past five, three mornings a week, a cold gym on the East Rand where the only other people were serious and quiet and left me alone. Sipho had been training for years and had never once mentioned it to me, because he is not that kind of man, and now he became my very reluctant teacher.

Starting from nothing, at thirty-five

I was embarrassingly unfit. I want to be honest about that, because too many of these stories skip the part where you are terrible.

I could not do a proper push-up. I got out of breath climbing the stairs to the change rooms. My back hurt from sitting, not from working. Sipho did not mock me, which I appreciated, but he did not baby me either. He showed me how to move properly, how to breathe, how to start with weights so light they were almost insulting and add slowly, week by week, so my body could adapt instead of break.

The point, he kept saying, was not to look like anything. The point was the number on the machine. The point was the funeral I was trying not to have.

He was also practical about the parts around the training. He is a chef by trade, so he took my eating apart with the same calm brutality he used on my form. Too little protein, he said, for a man asking his body to rebuild. Too much sugar. Too many meals eaten standing up or in the car. He got me eating properly, real food mostly, and on the mornings I was rushing to work after the gym he showed me how a scoop of Whey Protein in a shaker was a sensible way to actually eat something instead of skipping breakfast and grabbing a pie at ten.

The slow, boring victory

Nothing about it was dramatic. That is the thing nobody tells you. It was just half past five, over and over, through winter, through a stretch where I wanted to quit so badly I made excuses Sipho saw through instantly.

But the numbers moved. Slowly. My blood pressure came down over a few months, not to perfect, but down and still going, enough that my doctor raised his eyebrows and asked what I had changed. My weight came down too, which I had not even been trying for. I started sleeping properly. I stopped feeling that low hum of exhaustion I had assumed was just what being an adult felt like.

I got interested in it, in a way I never expected. I read about the food properly, not the nonsense on the internet but the actual sensible parts. I kept a bit of Protein Powder in the cupboard at work for the long days, and after a while, once I understood what it actually did and did not do, I added a little Creatine to the mornings as well, which Sipho had been quietly using for years and had never bothered to mention because to him it was as unremarkable as salt.

None of it was a miracle. All of it was just small sensible bricks, laid one at a time, in the dark, at half past five.

My daughter, at the door

The moment I knew it had all been worth it was small and had nothing to do with the gym.

My daughter, who is now old enough to notice things, watched me carry all the grocery bags in from the car in one trip, up the stairs, without stopping to breathe, and she said, "Daddy, you're strong now," in the offhand way children say the most important things.

I put the bags down and I had to turn away for a second, because she did not know, and I hoped she never would, that "strong now" was the whole reason I had been getting up in the cold for a year. So that she would have a father who could carry the bags. So that she would not be nineteen and dry-eyed at a funeral, not understanding.

Sipho still fetches me some mornings, though I go on my own now too. We do not talk much in the car. We do not need to. But once, pulling up outside the gym in the dark, he said, without looking at me, "Your old man would've liked this."

He would have. And with any luck, because of one cheap pharmacy machine and one friend who would not take no for an answer, I will be around long enough to say the same kind of thing to my daughter one cold morning, many years from now.