cwBlog

Or, What to do when you're really dehydrated. (This is assuming you read my last post and didn't heed the advice, or that you didn't get a chance to read it before realizing you were badly dehydrated, possibly because this is the page that comes up when you Google for "dehydrated.")

So I wasn't as far out of the woods as I thought in the last post. This next bit is going to get a bit explicit about a few of the bodily functions that are affected by dehydration.

I figured that a mix of salted iced tea and Coke (alternately) would get me rehydrated, but after about 10 pm I had a really hard time keeping either one down. So I did some research online and found a recipe for a rehydration drink:

1 liter room temperature water (a quart is close enough) 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 3 tablespoons sugar

Mix well. Drink until your urine is clear. If you can't keep it down, drink it in very small sips - between a teaspoon and a tablespoon in size - very frequently, once every minute. If you can't keep it down even then, wait half an hour and try again.

(There are other recipes, but most of them involved things we do not routinely have in our kitchen, like orange juice. It's not that we don't like OJ, but that if we have it, we drink it, and we feel virtuous about all its nutrition value; but real fruit has even more benefit.)

And if you don't urinate for more than 8 hours, that's a very bad sign; it's possible to have kidney damage. Also bad (but not as bad) if your urine is dark - but the fact that you're producing some in the first place is good. And dehydration has a very negative effect on your digestion and on the happiness of your stomach, which makes it hard to keep fluids down, which makes it hard to get rehydrated.

So at this point I'm making regular trips to the bathroom, and I'm tired, and fortunately there was a lot of The People's Court and Law & Order on the TiVo to watch. I've (knitting content ahead!) frogged the heel on a sock-in-progress that wound up about two inches short for my foot, and knit another 10 rounds on it, and started the new heel, but I can't concentrate to knit any more, and I'm going to try to get some sleep.

So, this is what I did today.

I left the air-conditioned comfort of the apartment and went to the air-conditioned comfort of the gym, where I spent half an hour on the treadmill. This is usually far more pleasant than it sounds, but today it was a slog all the way through. (It didn't help that I decided to try a different treadmill, more like a stair-stepper, which misunderstood my usual instruction "get my heart rate to 150 and keep it there for 30 minutes" as "get my heart rate to 170 and don't slack off"; when I couldn't figure out how to get it to relent, I hit "stop" and went back to my old style treadmill.) Still, the workout felt pretty good, especially when it was over.

Then I left the air-conditioned comfort of the gym and headed to the laundromat. Up until last Wednesday, as I had been working a full-time job 55 miles from home, my partner Jason, who has been doing consulting work designing websites while he's in school, handled the laundry. (Well, up until about January, we had a working washer-dryer, but it gave up the ghost and refused to dry. Repairs are likely to run in the $600 range, and a new model of the sort we'd like to get runs about $1600. The old one more than broke even, based on the cost of the laundromat, but we don't quite have $1600 available to drop on a laundry machine. But that's all background.)

For those in other parts of the country -- we're having a heat wave, and temperatures yesterday and today were in the mid-90s. (For those in other countries, that's about 35 degrees.) And it was cloudy and very very humid, and I was in a laundromat full of heat from dryers. I spent the hour and a half that the clothes were going in circles knitting and sweating. And sweating. And sweating.

Then the laundry was done, and I started to fold it. I made it about three-quarters of the way through, and started feeling sick to my stomach, and my arms started getting cramps. Bad sign, I thought. I had a can of ginger ale, sat down for a few minutes, and when the unhappy stomach feeling passed I finished folding the laundry, but by then I felt wretched. I drove home from the laundromat and asked Jason to carry the laundry upstairs. I'll spare you the precise details, but the sick-to-my-stomach feeling came back in spades.

To make a long story short: what happens when you work out, drink maybe a pint of water afterwards, then go sit in 95-degree heat and 80% or better humidity for an hour and a half? You get dehydrated. And what happens when you get dehydrated? You feel miserable, you can't keep food down (that's one of the details I had been sparing you), and you miss Wednesday night game night because you can't keep food down and it's not exactly polite guest behavior to puke on your host's rug.

Those of you suffering from similar heat, especially if you've grown accustomed to air conditioning:

Drink lots of water. Make sure you get enough salt; have a pretzel or two, and if they don't taste salty, have a few more. Do this before your body rebels, and you have to do things like drinking iced tea with salt added to it.

I've mostly recovered at this point, I think, though I want to drink at least another half gallon of water before bed.

Well, that decision that had me all jangly might need to be reconsidered.

Without going into too many details -- this is, after all, readable by the whole world -- I am no longer employed by the place that I have worked for the past year and a half.

Events of this magnitude, even when you've been planning for them and hoping for them and trying to find a way to make them happen for months, still take some processing. I expect I'm going to be knitting a good deal in the next few days.