Death, Salt and Fishing

Could something as simple as salt have prevented this tragedy?

It was a mystery why my aunt didn’t wake up one morning. There wasn’t reason to believe there was anything ‘wrong’ with her at all, she was her usual energetic, optimistic self just the day before.

She was always the one hosting the family gatherings. Now that I’m an adult I can appreciate just how much energy she had to be able to host over 40 people at her house and seem to enjoy every bit of it.

At one Easter party, I had snuck into my older cousin’s room to play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I was too young, stupid, or both to figure out the starting menu and accidentally deleted my cousin’s save file. Worse, I replaced it with a brand new file named: pppppppppp. I didn’t even know how to play, but judging from all the cool items he had, I knew enough to know that I had basically just deleted several days worth of progress. After realizing what I did, I snuck out of his room and went down the long hall and into the main room to look for a spot to lay low.

I always wanted the approval of my super cool, older cousins, but I was always screwing something up or doing something embarrassing. If he found out who pppppppppp was, it would be over. He’d not only know that I was stupid, but that my stupidity was so bad that it created collateral damage. I just hoped the family gathering would wrap up soon and I’d be back at home before my cousin looked at his Zelda file.

Not even 15 minutes later, we all heard my cousin shout from his room “WHO THE HELL IS P P P P P P???”

I stayed still on the couch, staring at a magazine trying not appear so visibly worried. I was thinking about how just how devastatingly low my standing with the older kids would sink. My aunt looked up from washing dishes and noticed me ‘reading’ a home decor magazine on the couch. My poker face was about as good as my game menu navigation. She quickly put two and two together and said ‘Don’t worry, you did him a favor. That game was always making him angry anyways.’ Despite the gravity of my crime, her genuine warmth, positivity and big smile actually cheered me up. The feeling of impending doom lessened substantially. She didn’t even have to try to put those around her in a good mood.

She died when I was in high school. For some reason I thought I had to be ‘cool’ at funerals too and refused to cry throughout the whole service. My parents had taken up Zen Buddhism sometime when I was a kid. For a time we meditated for about 20 minutes each Sunday. I hated meditating. The entire time we were sitting quietly meditating, I wasn’t focusing on my breath. I was just hoping one of the cats would come and sit on me. Yet, at the funeral I was doing my best to meditate and keep my mind still so I could maintain my composure and stay ‘cool.’ A good hour and a half after arriving at the venue, I finally saw my cousin (the brother of the one who lost his Zelda file) in the courtyard. He cheerfully gave me a big hug and said ‘how’s it going??’

This guy just lost his Mom. That thought brought the reality of the situation to the forefront of my mind and overwhelmed my meditation technique. I barely got a ‘hey’ out between sobs.

It wasn’t until much later that I asked my Mom how exactly my aunt died. She said it was kind of a mystery, but I remember her saying that they found there was “practically no salt left in her body.”

The day before she died, my aunt had been out fishing in the hot sun for several hours. They had brought along a big cooler filled with plenty of cool drinks and cold beers. At the time, she had been taking a type of over-the-counter diet pill, which likely increased her physical activity while reducing her appetite.

Hyponatremia (low sodium in the blood) is a serious condition where there is not enough sodium in the body. It can lead to nausea, vomiting, confusion, seizures, loss of consciousness and in some cases, death.

The diet pills and the beer would have both acted as a diuretic and flushed out sodium. It’s known that drinking excessive amounts of beer alone can cause hyponatremia, leading to something called “Beer Drinkers’ Hyponatremia.” My aunt wouldn’t have been capable of drinking that much beer, but she would have also been losing sodium through her sweat from fishing and lugging equipment around under the hot sun. This would have made her thirsty. Drinking plenty of sodium-less fluids means flushing out even more sodium through urination and diluting the sodium concentration of the blood. Marathon runners are known to be at risk of developing hyponatremia from sweating a ton and drinking too much fluid. I doubt my aunt’s sweating would have been on par with running a marathon. Though, all these factors combined could have dangerously compromised the sodium levels of her body.

I don’t know what her opinion on low-salt diets was at the time. Though, what if the anti-salt messaging stemming from the U.S. dietary guidelines was different? I’ve explained in multiple videos why I don’t agree with the ‘restrict your salt intake to prevent a heart attack’ advice, but what if included in that ‘official’ messaging was the caveat that it’s a biological fact that your body does need some salt? All we hear is ‘eat less salt.’ There’s no reminder that ‘actually your body needs at least a little salt, and you need more if you’re sweating, exercising, urinating a lot, or drinking a lot of hypotonic fluids.’

We’re also told that drinking plenty of water is great for you - as much as eight glasses of water a day. Except, this specific amount was made up out of thin air - eight glasses of water a day isn’t an amount backed up by science.

Recently I saw a video by Dr. Sermend Mezher explaining that your urine is not actually supposed to be clear. He brought up the case of Ray who developed water intoxication after drinking six bottles of water in a single hour while playing outside.

According to a New York post article on Ray:

By 10:30 p.m., Ray “couldn’t control his head or arms or anything,” said the boy’s dad, Jeff Jordan. “His motor functions were gone.”

One of the parents added, “He almost seemed like he was on drugs, drunk, even mentally handicapped at that point.”

After doctors gave him sodium and potassium for eight hours, he woke up and asked for some food and wanted to know where he was.

Water intoxication is no joke. Back in 2009, Jennifer Strange’s family was awarded 16.5 million dollars by a California jury after she died from a radio show contest. The contest was called “Hold your Wee for a Wii” that challenged participants to drink the most water without using the bathroom. The winner would get a Nintendo Wii.

At the time of the incident, Laura Rios, one of Strange's co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento said Strange "said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad... She was crying and that was the last that anyone had heard from her."

Strange was found dead Friday, January 12, 2007, hours after the contest.

The average person under 65 who is not intentionally restricting salt is very very unlikely to find themselves at risk of hyponatremia or water intoxication. This really isn’t something you need to vigilantly keep at bay. Barring some unique sodium-depleting circumstances, salting your food to taste is plenty. However, the importance of salt is something we should keep in mind if unique sodium-depleting circumstances arise. If you’re going on a hike through the grand canyon, bring some salt tablets. Don’t run a marathon, drink beer and go to the sauna all in one day, but if you must then you need to definitely up your salt intake. Never enter a water chugging contest.

I miss hanging out at my aunt’s parties. I miss her. I don’t know if just giving her more salt would have meant she’d have woken up that morning. Though, I’d let someone delete all 156 of my Youtube videos and rename the channel pppppppppp if it meant I could go back and give her plenty of salty snacks for her fishing trip.