My poor friend Hazel is hobbling around in pain waiting for a hip operation. But she can't have one because she has high blood pressure; because she is worried about her hip operation and is desperate for her blood pressure to go down, so it goes up. Last week she tottered to hospital for her checkup, and up shot the BP.

"This is really dangerous," said the nurse. "You must go to your doctor first thing in the morning, and I hope nothing happens between now and then." Hazel left hospital suffering from severe White Coat Syndrome, her eyes staring, her face puce and her BP at a rolling boil. She is taking the pills and has now been given one of those little machines so that she can measure her BP at home. But it does her no good.

The minute she tries it, up shoots the BP. Yesterday the machine flicked off with no reading. "I thought I was dead," said Hazel, but she tried to keep calm, realised she was still here and the battery had gone down. But it still made her BP go up, so she is stymied. The more her leg hurts, the more desperate she gets, the higher the BP.

She is not alone. Fielding is still battling with his blood pressure. He thinks that his pills have unfortunate side-effects: insanity, impotence and gout, so naturally, the higher the dose, the madder, goutier and more impotent poor Fielding will get, so the higher the BP rises, the more pills he will need, which makes him phenomenally nervous at his BP tests, and up it goes.

The doctor tries her very best to help him. She is relaxed, cheery and keeps him there for half an hour, hoping he might calm down. "Breathe from your toes up," says she, but Fielding can't, because he knows there are no lungs in his feet.

Luckily, Hazel is getting the hang of her machine. But her blood pressure goes down only if she takes it three times running, and tomorrow she goes to the doctor, where they take it only twice, which is very worrying. Thump, thump, thump.

• For more on Fielding's life, read his new blog