A South Carolina boy was taken to the hospital with water intoxication after he downed six bottles of water in one hour on a scorching hot day.
Ray Jordan, 10, was playing with friends outside Columbia over the Fourth of July holiday weekend when he nearly lost his life.
Within an hour of the water rising, the boy was showing disturbing symptoms that had his parents fearing the worst.
‘(Ray) couldn’t control his head or his arms or anything,’ his father Jeff Jordan told WIS-TV. ‘His motor function is gone.’ It’s unclear what size water bottles Ray drank.
The 10-year-old has thankfully made a full recovery, but her parents’ warning serves as a reminder to others about the dangers presented by the hot summer months.
Satyajit was rushed to hospital where he was found to be suffering from ‘water intoxication’, with sodium levels in his blood dangerously low.
The boy’s brush with death came as he, like millions of other Americans, was enjoying the warm weather for the Fourth of July festivities.
His parents said that hours before he was admitted to hospital, an excited Roy was going ‘full throttle’ with his cousins, ‘running circles around the house, a bunch of boys together, jumping on the trampoline’.
However, his mother Stacey said that after a while he became thirsty and went inside to get himself some water.
‘We didn’t realize how much he got,’ he added, as it was later revealed he downed six bottles between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m.
Within an hour, his father Jeff said the boy ‘couldn’t control his head or his arms or anything’, and his ‘motor function was gone.’
As the reality of the situation settled in, the parents added that Ray was apparently deteriorating, and that he ‘almost looked like he was drugged, drunk or even mentally retarded’.
Ray Jordan, 10, was playing with friends outside Columbia on the Fourth of July when he guzzled six bottles of water in an hour.
The boy’s relieved parents Stacey (left) and Jeff (right) said they feared the worst when they saw their son had deteriorated and completely lost his motor skills.
How drinking too much water can be dangerous
Excess fluid intake can lead to hyponatremia.
Also known as water intoxication, hyponatremia develops from having too much water in the body.
This means blood sodium levels – which your body needs for fluid balance – are abnormally low.
The average adult needs 3-4 liters of water a day, but the kidneys can process only one liter of water per hour.
With nowhere else to go, fluid builds up inside the body’s cells, causing them to swell.
An imbalance causes body cells, including brain cells, to swell.
Body swelling can be controlled if excess amounts accumulate in muscle or fat layers, but if accumulated in the brain, it can cause serious health problems due to its rigid structure.
Symptoms of water intoxication include headache, confusion, or drowsiness, but when the pressure rises, patients can suffer brain damage, fall into a coma, and in extreme cases, even die.
The 10-year-old child was rushed to Prisma Health Children’s Hospital after panicking.
There, urgent tests were conducted on the verdict. And it turned out he was suffering from ‘water intoxication’.
A medical crisis occurs when the kidneys cannot handle the flood of large amounts of water at once, leading to severely low sodium levels in the blood.
‘They were giving him something to help him urinate as much as possible to get these fluids out because it was swollen around his brain – that’s why his head was hurting so much,’ Stacey added.
After further procedures, including monitoring his blood with updated sodium and potassium levels, his mother recalled that he miraculously ‘barely woken up’.
Not knowing how close he came to endangering his health, the mother added that Ray woke up saying: ‘Where am I? What happened?’
His relieved parents added that Ray has since made a full recovery and has no ongoing side effects.
However, they say it should serve as a cautionary tale for other parents who don’t want to know the dangers.
‘It never occurred to us that it was dangerous,’ said the parents.
The couple insisted that the crisis could have been avoided by replacing water with sports drinks.
Health authorities recommend alternating between water and drinks like Gatorade on hot days to combat dehydration, because the electrolytes in sports drinks don’t dilute sodium levels in the blood.