Way too long. Read at your own risk, and with little hope of entertainment.
This past week, I drove from Alabama up to Ithaca, New York (see my awed Wegmans thread) to do some research at Cornell. I drove up to Hagerstown, Maryland on Saturday (about 12 hours), then the other 6 or so hours up to Ithaca. I spent all week in the lab (mixed results, not all that great), then drove down to DC to hang out with a friend of mine who works at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Spent a couple of days there, then hit the road for home yesterday morning.
Everything started out great. Gorgeous morning, limited traffic on I-81. I thought I might actually be home in time to see the second half of the Bama-Tennessee game. I was very much looking forward to being home, seeing my wife and 7-month old, and licking my wounds from a largely unsuccessful, from a professional standpoint, trip.
Somewhere in that long, long drive down the spine of Virginia, I started feeling weird. I was queasy and uncomfortable. Eventually, I started feeling faint. Damn it, this is not in the agenda. I figured I was simply hungry, so I stopped at a convenience store for some quick energy in the form of a candy bar and a stick of beef jerky. I went to the restroom, and I was stunned that my hands were shaking uncontrollably. It was so weird. I even tried relaxing them completely at my side, but they were shaking like I had DT’s. I started feeling so bad in line that I peeled the candy bar open and started munching it immediately.
Outside, I started feeling better. I walked around, got the blood flowing, and about 15 minutes later, figured I’d solved the problem at least long enough for me to find some real food. No more shaky hands. OK, so, back on the road.
Bad idea. Not 5 miles later, it came back with a raging vengeance. Suddenly, I was acutely nauseated, feeling more faint than ever, my heart was POUNDING, I’d broken into a cold sweat, and I was getting black spots in front of my eyes. Recognizing that I was acting stupid and reckless, and that my fainting while driving at 70 mph was perhaps not in anyone’s best interest, I pulled the car over and staggered out. I was disoriented, and I immediately started dry-heaving beside the car.
I pulled out my cell phone, but dropped it in the grass twice because my hands were so unsteady. I dialed 911. Apparently I’d been acting so pathetic on the side of the road that someone had already called, because the operator knew what color car I was driving, and at what mile-marker I’d stopped (thanks, anonymous Samaritan! I sincerely appreciate it.) Next, I called my wife. She didn’t answer, so I left a message. I listened to it today, on her phone, and it made very little sense. It was weird listening to myself sounding so garbled, panicky, and pitiful, with the sounds of 18-wheelers raging down the highway drowning me out occasionally. The gist was that I thought I might be dying.
And that’s the thing. I’m all alone on the road, 600 miles from home, after a largely normal day of driving, and within 10 minutes, I’m convinced that I’m going to die on the side of the interstate. Nothing like this has EVER happened to me. I’ve always been ludicrously healthy. As I would tell the EMT later, the last time I was in the hospital was 26 years ago, when I had arthroscopic surgery on my knee. But my hands were cold and unsteady, I couldn’t stand up. I was feeling pukey and faint, with my vision coming in and out at random.
I thought I was having a heart attack at 38, with no prior history of heart problems. I thought I was going to be that guy, the one who everybody remembers because he died young, keeling over on the side of the highway, leaving a wife and infant behind.
Panic attack? I guess it could happen. I’ve been feeling pretty low about things recently. I can’t get my experiments to work, and I might be running out of time to remain on my department stipend. That certainly has been making me anxious, but I still have some time, and I have some ideas to move forward, so maybe not.
Oh shit. My mother died of diabetes. I’ve probably gained 30 pounds in the last five years, I’m smoking again, and since the baby came, I haven’t exactly been eating perfectly all the time. Ohmygod if I live, they’re going to tell me that I’m an undiagnosed diabetic, and that I had crashed. After that, it’s insulin the rest of my life, with intense pain and a bad death at the end of it, just like my mother.
That’s what it was like. I couldn’t dismiss any of the possibilities, so given the unavoidable fact that I was obviously dying, lying in the grass as I was, I was mulling over all of them at once. It was terrifying. I can’t honestly say it was more terrifying than having first my wife’s, then my son’s, heart rates crash during delivery, but it was right the heck up there. I was seriously contemplating my mortality on an immediate, demanding basis. The experience is…gloomy.
I remember feeling incredibly lonely, too. I just wanted to be home, petting a kitty. I wanted to see my wife and son. I just wanted to be back on the road, driving south. FUCK.
The state trooper was a kind guy. He helped me sit up, tried to give me something to drink, and talked to me until the rescue team arrived. I got piled into the ambulance, and after the most miserable twenty minute ride I can remember, I ended up at a small rural hospital.
I tried my best to tell them what was going on, but I’m sure they thought I was on drugs. I wasn’t. No dodgy vital signs. Blood sugar was dead, solid average (whew!). Heart rate was fast, but regular (whew!) Holy crap, was I REALLY just having a panic attack?! They kept trying to start an IV, and I have great veins, but they couldn’t get anything going. That was fun. Both my arms look like giant bruises today.
And that’s what was wrong.
“He’s dry,” the nurse said. They eventually got one to take, and started dripping saline. Within an hour, I was feeling almost normal again.
I had let my damn idiot self get incredibly dehydrated. How stupid can you be? Just drink some damn water! I started thinking, though. Night before last, I had a few beers when I first got to my friend’s house. I don’t remember really drinking any more water the next day. That night, I had a few MORE beers at the party at the museum. And weren’t a couple of those high-gravity? Again, no water afterward. And then that morning, I had had a metric buttload of coffee, both before I left, and pretty much all day on the road, and we all know that coffee is a diuretic. Really, it could probably be traced to the start of the trip. I’d been going like hell all week, after all.
I ended up getting recharged on water, feeling fine, and then getting back on the road after a few more hours. I took the rest of the trip very easy, and put away three large bottles of water on the road. It was astounding how dehydrated I was. How the hell could I have let myself get so unbelievably dry that I ended up crawling on the side of the interstate, thinking I was going to die?
A piece of advice for those unclear on the moral: drink water. :smack:
I’m still gobsmacked about how profoundly a simple lack of water affected my body’s chemistry. Zero-star experience. Avoid if possible.
