I picked a good time to give up health insurance.

When you don't have health insurance but are a human being, you sometimes resort to things like ordering your contact lenses from Canada and going to Planned Parenthood for birth control. I debated even writing this post but then thought that was silly, it's not some big secret, is it? But I will confess that I didn't check in on Foursquare at the last second despite convincing myself beforehand that I would.

Anyway, going to Planned Parenthood is a harrowing experience even if you're not looking for abortions and candy. There are metal detectors, a pretty serious search for weapons and other crazy person accessories, and then you get in there and it's all terrified teen couples. I went alone, because, you know, independence. You fill out the kind of paperwork that always gives me an existential crisis ("Is it possible that your partner has had other partners in the past six months?" check: Yes / No / I don't know. Isn't it always I don't know?? How could you say 'it's NOT possible'??) and then wait a couple hours.

For those who aren't women, pretty standard procedure is a weighing, a pregnancy test (peeing in a cup), and blood pressure taking. The woman who took my blood pressure made a face before trying it a second time. "Did you run here?" she asked me. (It's 100 degrees in NY today.)

I showed her my shoes. "Is it bad?" I asked.

She looked at me up and down. "You're not overweight, so I don't know what this is...You have really, really high blood pressure. But the nurse will check you again, it could be a mistake."

I followed the nurse through a maze of hallways and felt like if my blood pressure wasn't high before, it definitely was now. Not that I knew exactly what high blood pressure meant, except that my father has it. And that it gave him a stroke last year.

The nurse took my blood pressure a third time and looked at me. "Do you smoke?" was the first question. We took turns asking questions and the haze started to settle and I understood what was happening. I asked her what the risk of my blood pressure was. "Well. Heart failure, heart attack, stroke. Oh, or kidney failure." She looked sympathetic and judgmental at the same time. "You need to see a doctor either today or tomorrow."

"I don't have health insurance," I told her, alarmed.

She gave me a printout of doctors in Brooklyn who take patients without insurance and told me about hospitals that have emergency-care offices you can walk into. The word "emergency" also bothered me. She seemed surprised that I wasn't getting dizzy spells, blurred vision or fainting. "Your body has probably just adjusted to this over time." What??

It's always an awful thing to find out your lifestyle is killing you more quickly than you thought. She strongly recommended phasing certain things out over time, since a drastic change could give me a heart attack or stroke(!), and also put me on a special birth control that doesn't contain estrogen which is also really bad for your heart. I came home, read up on foods that lower blood pressure, and forced myself to eat a quarter of an avocado and beans (both of which I love usually) without salt. I felt sick after. I still feel sick.