Hyponatremia

Joe is in the hospital with Hyponatremia, or in more simple terms, water intoxication. From what I've read and been told since last night, when you drink too much water, your kidneys can't process it all at once, so the excess water ends up diluting your blood salt levels and causes the fluid to rush to the brain, where the salt levles remain normal. The extra fluid in the brain causes it to swell. Since the skull is hard, the brain doesn't have a lot of room for expansion and you basically feel like your head is going to explode. You also experience nausea, confusion, and can have seizures, lose consciousness, or go into a coma.

Joe signed up for the city tennis league and played in a match last night. He's prone to heat stroke, and it was hot, so in an attempt to avoid getting it he drank somewhere around 15-20 bottles of water in a three hour period. He didn't realize that he was hurting his body by doing so. By the end of the match he could hardly move or think straight. He called his brother, Derek, who promptly went to the tennis courts and drove him home. In addition to not being able to move, he had a massive headache and nausea. I called the doc on call and she said not to give him anything more to drink, give him a little salt (like pretzels), and watch him for an hour. She said he may get seizures, so to watch him closely. After about 15 minutes his eyes started to roll back into his head, he said "I'm going to faint" and he lost consciousness for a few seconds. Derek and I looked at eachother and said, "Let's take him in". Joe managed to crawl to the car (he didn't want us to carry him). Derek's wife, Aubree, graciously offered to watch the kids for me. As soon as we got to the hospital he started vomiting. They hooked him up to a bunch of monitors, took some blood samples to check for decreased sodium and potassium levels, and did an EKG. He told me he felt like he was going to die and to take good care of the kids. Joe's dad and brother came over and gave him a blessing.

Then weird things started to happen. He said his throat felt like it was swelling up and felt like he couldn't breathe even though he was breathing. All of a sudden he started slurring his speech really bad and we couldn't understand a word he was saying. He threw up some more and then his ability to speak came back but a mask of total confusion came over him. He looked at me like he didn't know who I was, and when he spoke, his sentence structures were a jumbled mess. The blood tests showed his potassium and sodium were low, so they hooked him up to a bag of that stuff through an IV. He threw up lots more and they moved him from the ER to a hospital room. At midnight, I came home to feed the baby while his dad stayed with him at the hospital. At 3 a.m., Derek took over for his dad. I just called this morning and Derek said he's coherent, is starting to get his strength back, and is emptying his bladder well. As soon as the kids wake up I'm going back to the hospital. I'm so grateful he's doing better, because a lot of people have died from water intoxication.

I was planning on writing today about our move (we're all settled in now), and my latest Craigslist adventures, but will have to postpone that for the time being. It's a promise of things to come. In the mean time say a little prayer for Joe. Even though he's better than he was last night, he's still in bad shape. It will probably take him at least a day or two before he's back to normal.