CW: reference to bodily processes, broad discussion of illness
This year’s “once in a generation” weather
Last week was brutally hot across Europe, with multiple countries recording their hottest ever temperatures. Others including the UK repeatedly smashed their record for the month of June.
While climate change is a global problem, it affects different regions in different ways, and Europe is disproportionately affected by hotter temperatures and heatwaves.
The “Chicory House” we’re currently living in has terrible thermal characteristics, so we took the advice of wiser folks about staying cool. We created a “cold zone” in the living room with a portable air conditioner and for a few days I lived, worked, ate and slept mostly out of that one room (along with the children when they were trapped home because their schools had been shut down).
I thought our precautions would be sufficient, but I was wrong.
Heat exhaustion
After coming home from a shady morning dog walk on Friday2, I felt hot and grumpy, tired, and incredibly thirsty. I pushed on through my workday’s Friday hotfix, then retreated to my bedroom for a nap.
This was a mistake: my bedroom is somehow the hottest room in the Chicory House.
On Saturday I felt dreadful. It was as if some tiny monster had discovered a switch: one that they could use, randomly and without warning, to toggle me from being a warm blooded animal to a cold blooded one and back again, intermittently wrecking my capacity to regulate my temperature.
Here: I made a simulator3 –
I’d feel overwhelmingly hot but barely sweat, or I’d suddenly switch to feeling cold and shivering. A cool bath helped, but only for a little while: between going to bed on Saturday night and getting up on Sunday morning there were more hours during which I took a shower4 than hours during which I slept.
Water that I drank seemed to just fall straight through without touching either sweat glands or my bladder. Or else it’d come right back out the way it went in. Attempting to eat solid foods would result in hours of horrible abdominal cramps.
Clearly, I was quite unwell.
Opportunistic infection
If you’re looking at all of those symptoms and you’re thinking “wait, could this be heatstroke-related organ damage?”… then yeah, that was one of my concerns. I mean: I’ve only once felt more-ill than I did on Sunday… and that was over a decade ago when I was hospitalised with an antibiotic-resistant kidney infection.
I can’t claim that I wasn’t influenced by growing reports of long heatwave-related waits at A&E departments. If I have to sit somewhere uncomfortable, feeling rotten, then it might as well be at home!
But also: on the balance of probability, I figured I knew what had happened. I’d suffered a moderately severe heat exhaustion that’d weakened my immune response to some kind of opportunistic bacterial gastroenteritis5.
When it reached Monday, the monster had stopped flicking the thermoregulation switch (did you set it the way you think it belongs, by the way?), but my digestive system still just seemed to be in its degraded state. That is: just an inflamed and painful tube through which I could pour fluids.
With thanks to weareheroes for the icons, used under a Creative Commons license.
So I finally caved and saw a doctor, who prodded and poked me and said… yup, my hunch was right and I should go back to lying in the cool and living on fluids and come bother him again only if it doesn’t get any better (or gets worse).
If you’d noticed that I’d been unusually “offline” for the last few days6… well, it’s because mostly I’ve been lying in bed and/or groaning in discomfort.
But I feel like I’m moving in the right direction again now, and I’m optimistic that when I try solid food again today that maybe I’ll be able to digest it. Fingers crossed!
Lessons learned
So what have we learned from all of this:
- Heat exhaustion is real, and it’s nasty, and it can leave you vulnerable to all kinds of other problems.
- (Even when my guts are in pain) I can trust my gut feeling on whether or not it’s a medical emergency7. Please disregard any Aber Effect comic which implies otherwise.
- You can probably be trusted with access the the Dan Thermoregulation Switch. You didn’t play with it at all!
Let me know below whether I was right to let you play with the switch. And look forward to hearing more from me now that I’m working towards feeling better again.
Footnotes
1 Obviously this is a joke, but the world we live in nowadays means that I feel that I have to say so.
2 It’s possible my heat exhaustion had begun to build up before Friday: Ruth observes that I reported feeling dizzy or lightheaded a couple of times during the week prior. But for the sake of the story, let’s call Friday the start of the problem.
3 If you can’t see the results of toggling the switch, it’s because I’m too far away from you to hear me groaning. Or maybe because it’s not that accurate a simulation. One of those.
4 Several times, literally lying foetal, exhausted, on the floor of the shower, only moving to tweak the dial to keep my body at the temperature I felt it “should” be at.
5 I’ve no idea how my relatively-isolated lifestyle exposed me to such an infection, but it’s quite possible that it was brought home by somebody, even me, whose immune system was working better and had it suppressed to the point of being asymptomatic… but with me exhausted and dehydrated it was able to gain a foothold. Or maybe it came from somewhere else. Perhaps I just need to stop French kissing the dog?
6 I was running a daily streak of 177 days of consecutive blogging – every day so far this year! – up until I got ill, so posting nothing to DanQ.me for four days… probably sounded like I was dead!
7 Sometimes it’s just bad sun tag-teaming with a bad stomach bug!
