Ever since my doctor diagnosed me with high blood pressure, he’s been telling me to remove stress from my life.

Hello, they’re called relatives.

No, I’m just kidding, if I know what’s good for me. But I can’t remove stress. Not only is stress an essential part of deadlines, it’s also an essential ingredient in the humor of my articles. Every article, if you remove the punch lines, is actually just about stress. For example, this one.

So in general, I’d been hoping to reduce my blood pressure between doctor visits by losing weight. And it happens to be that overweight people have high blood pressure. How do I explain this? OK, the way blood pressure works is that it’s a measurement of how hard your heart has to work to pump blood to your entire body via all the little tubes. It’s like water pressure in a hose. So let’s say you’re trying to force water through a hose, and there’s a fat guy sitting on it.

So this morning, when I went to the doctor for my semi-annual checkup, which is not my idea at all, he told me that my blood pressure was once again high.

So I blamed him. I said, “Of course it’s high now. I’m at the doctor.”

I’m not even sure how much the blood pressure numbers mean in the first place, because the nurse took my blood pressure, and then the doctor took it a couple of minutes later, and it was 10 points off. Points? I don’t know what to call them. Are they points? Pounds per square inch?

Basically, the doctor told me that, at the moment, I had a 130 over 90 blood pressure. Which, if you know math, can be reduced to 13 over 9. So that’s not so bad.

Nevertheless, he said he wanted me to wear a 24-hour blood-pressure cuff. This is a cuff that inflates itself at random times over the course of the day, often at inopportune moments, such as when you’re carrying groceries. The idea, he explained, was to see if my blood pressure would be high when I was asleep, when I wouldn’t be full of excuses.

And I thought to myself, “I hope I don’t have any bad dreams that night. Like a dream where a giant is suddenly squeezing my arm.”

He was actually surprised that I agreed to the cuff as fast as I did: “None of the other patients say yes so fast.”

Well, none of the other patients have an article to write.

I asked, “When are we doing this?” and the doctor said, “We have to coordinate a day that no one else is using the cuff.” It’s not like I can share.

So I asked, “Would it be easier for my wife to just use the one I have at home to take my blood pressure when I’m asleep? Like I’ll go to bed with the cuff on, and in the middle of the night my wife will randomly push the button? And I’ll scream and fall out of bed?”

But they wanted me to use theirs, so that’s the plan—Plan A was to lose weight, but this one, Plan B, is to wear a cuff for 24 hours, and if I can’t control myself from panicking when the thing turns on when I’m asleep, the doctor will add another pill to my regimen, and I won’t have to lose weight! So that’s good news, right?

But I don’t want to take any pills, ideally. I don’t like to be dependent on anything specific, because of this ridiculous desert-island mentality that I have. I’ve read enough books about people stranded on desert islands, and the first problem they always run into is the one guy who doesn’t have his medication or something. Somebody has to learn to live without his inhaler. So the lesson I always walk away with from these books is, “I don’t want to be that guy.”

So generally, when doctors take my blood pressure, I try to skew it low. I close my eyes and picture myself in a relaxing setting, only my brain is scrambling to find the first relaxing setting I can think of before the readings kick in, so I basically always picture myself on a beach chair looking out over the ocean, with maybe a single palm tree over my right shoulder. I don’t know why that’s my go-to place. I have never in real life brought a beach chair to the ocean, or even really relaxed on a beach. Are the crowds about to show up? Why don’t I hear my kids? How am I going to clean all this sand out of my car? And what’s with the single palm tree? Is this a desert island? Is it possible that every time I try to have less-stressful thoughts, I think I’m picturing some tropical paradise, but I’m actually picturing a desert island, which is making me even more stressed? I need to come up with a new place.

So naturally, I asked him what I should do over the course of the day that I’d have the cuff on. Do I want to live normally over these 24 hours or not? Should I try to keep my numbers low? Should I specifically not do exercise, like always? On the one hand, regular exercise lowers your blood pressure. But on the other hand, it raises your blood pressure while you’re doing it.

But the doctor said, “Do what you normally do over the course of the day—nothing special.”

Either way it’s not going to be a totally accurate reading. If I really want an accurate reading, I should probably not tell my wife about the blood pressure cuff. Or my kids. But that will skew it high.

That said, maybe the desert island isn’t the worst idea. Just for a day.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].