I have a fraught relationship with medical tests. I'm the same age as the OP (66), but female. And unlike the OP, I currently have a diet high in processed foods and sugar. I've never been overweight, and have always had total cholesterol in the low 200s.
When I was in my early 30s a doctor told me to work on my diet and come back and get my cholesterol retested. I ate as I always did and came back and my numbers were better and the doctor congratulated me. My first experience with thinking, "Hmm..." when it came to cholesterol, and actually, medical advice in general.
A few years ago, I ran across a booth the hospital had set up and I got my blood sugar tested because my feet are always cold and one of my toes became red and sort of raw looking and I wondered if I had diabetes. My blood sugar was in the low 60s and I was told it was fine. (As I side note, on the way there we had stopped for dinner and I had a Jersey Mike's roast beef sandwich and several glasses of sweet tea, and refilled it for the road.)
Then right after that the local doc-in-a-box chain had free screenings, so I went several times using different names.
Here are my numbers, reading vertically for the first test, the second test three days later, and the third test 13 days after the second test. All tests were done with fasting.
Total: 232 189 227
HDL: 75 80 81
LDL: blank 75 125
Tri: 441 171 104
gluc: 115 123 111
Ack. I can't get the editing thing to let me put extra spaces in to spread the numbers out a little for readability. Sorry! I'll put them in this format, too:
Test 1: TC 232, HDL 75, LDL ---, Tri 441, gluc 115
Test 2: TC 189, HDL 80, LDL 75, Tri 171, gluc 123
Test 3: TC 227, HDL 81, LDL 125, Tri 104, gluc 111
But I want to show the numbers because of the big differences within a little over two weeks: that first test looks pretty scary, but the other two less scary but in different ways. Which one is "right"? (And I still don't get the glucose numbers, compared to my post-Jersey-Mike's-sweet-tea numbers, but I'm confident I don't have diabetes so I don't care.)
Then we have blood pressure. Whenever I get it tested, it's right after I've walked from the waiting room (where I've been sitting well past my appointment time no doubt) into the examining room (I walk fast, always) and I've been answering questions, and my blood pressure is almost always a little high. Plus I don't enjoy going to the doctor.
So they test it and I say, "Give me a minute--I can get it lower" and I concentrate on breathing deeply in and out and the subsequent reading is always fine. My heart rate is always high, period. So a few months ago I did an experiment, on one of those cuff machines the public can use, at a hospital gym.
I did test after test sitting there, without getting up. Here are the results, with blood pressure followed by heart rate:
132/73 101
107/70 94
123/74 94
122/71 95
107/78 95
114/82 96
113/80 100*
116/77 99*
*The last two were done with the conscious breathing I described above. These numbers tell me it helps only to lower an elevated blood pressure, and has no effect if my blood pressure is already "normal."
IIRC, the legend on the machine told me that the numbers on several of my readings indicated I had elevated blood pressure. But I don't think I do. And as with the cholesterol tests--which one of these is "my" blood pressure?
And finally, after my spate of cholesterol tests I started taking fish oil because I'd heard it would lower my cholesterol. After about four months, I got another cholesterol test and the total cholesterol wasn't significantly different. When the guy told me what the result was, I told him why I got the test and said, "So I'm not gonna take the fish oil any more," and he said, "You should take it anyway."
Huh? I didn't press it, but why?? I took it for something I could measure (unlike "brain health" or whatever) and didn't see a difference, so why continue to take it? Of course it could be that THIS test was wonky, and the fish oil DID dramatically decrease my cholesterol, but I'm just not interested in digging deeper into it. I wanted it to lower my cholesterol, but when it didn't, I'm more than happy to jettison it and close the book.
Maybe I'm just a medical freak, but my experience does show that for at least one person, test results really ARE just a moment in time, and could change from problematic to not that bad in a short period of time, for no discernible reason at all. I don't go to the doctor for checkups or anything, so I don't get bloodwork done, but after this, I know that if I did and got back results that indicated a problem, I'd get another test done as quickly as possible, without changing anything in my life.
And if I REALLY believed in the variability of tests, even if I got results that indicated no problems at all I'd get another test done as quickly as possible without changing anything in my life, because maybe the "okay" test was the anomaly. But of course if the first test tells me what I want to hear, who wants to get another test that might contradict it?