Well Schutzi, as rev well knew, it was an impossible reading!
BigM, newbie succumbed to the hard sell of some mail order co, or supermarket like Lidl. I mention Lidl because I stock up on theirs myself when they have them. I do this not because I am easily frightened, although as we have seen on here before, such self-monitoring gizmos do breed neurosis, but because I can go to 260/150 and am on massive multiple medication, which never stops my brain pumping itself right back up to where it wants to be, as may have become apparent from my postings on here before now, and because if you are too compliant and just take what the medics prescribe you get overmedicated and fall about. My cardiologist therefore is all for patients like me whom he can trust to administer their own meds taking their own BP and titrating their doses accordingly. He says systemic hypertension and diabetes are very similar conditions, and have to be medicated accordingly, and so did his predecessor before him.
It is genetic, of course, and how do you think I feel about having inflicted it on my darling son, who was diagnosed with severe hypertension at 21, and advised to monitor himself? I gave him one of my monitors, but he doesn�t want to know.
BTW Schutzi, in case you have shares in Lidl, I am not putting them down: their sphygmos appear to be accurate enough for a bit, but are hard cases of built-in expendability.