Before I dive into this, I am a hypochondriac with depression and anxiety unfortunately. Well, I took a trip down to the after hours clinic because I was running low on my inhaler, they were closing soon and I didn't have my car so I decided to skateboard there. I got in and sat down for about an hour and they started to take my blood pressure and the nurse looked shocked, quite honestly I was so frightened that I forgot what my reading was, but before they released me, the doctor said "you're too young and skinny to have blood pressure this high." Which I will attest, I'm 22 years old and 120 pounds. But my diet has never been too great, but not so bad that I'd imagine it could do this much to me so soon. So they released me with a prescription for HCTZ and set me up an appointment with a heart and vascular doctor that the nurse works at also. Well, the day before my appointment I call the office and they never even had an appt. for me at all. So now I'm starting to have some doubts. I'm about 4-5 days into HCTZ and I grow even more anxious, stressed, and doubtful, my town has a history of bad docs. Fortunately I took home a good blood pressure machine from the clinic I work at and start a journal of my pressure readings every hour. Day 1 without meds, my pressure was ranging SYS 140s to 110s and DIA 90s to 79. Strange. Day 2, first day of meds, pretty similar but both SYS and DIA are quite normal, but now my pulse is getting up to the 90s and no higher than 105. By then I was starting to have bad side effects like the typical dizziniess, but my hearts starting pump harder every time I do anything standing up or moving and my chest gets a little tight. Day 3, my numbers are high that morning, then it takes all day to come down. Day 4, my numbers are perfect, even got a 102/75 that evening. Day 5 was my day off and I decided to take a break from the machine, started to experience rough constipation. Today is day 6 and as soon as I got to work I took my HCTZ and checked my pressure, it was 144/95 99 BPM, which oddly enough, I took another reading 40 minutes after that and now it's 118/86 85 BPM. I don't even know what's going on. So there's the summary of my journal. Now before all this happened I was drinking anywhere from 3-6 beers a night for about a month due to a family death, had some problems coping with it but slimmed my beer intake to 2 a night just for the sole purpose of trying to lower my BP. I'm stressed out but I got a new doctor appt. in about a week. Until then it's been getting me down. I was hoping I could post this here to see if anyone could put my mind at ease, if this sounds like secondary hypertension or an underlying thing. I've done pretty great keeping my sodium under 2,300 mg lately. And a side note, my father has high blood pressure and diabetes, my mother and son both have a heart murmur. And I've experienced a fast heart beat most of my young life.