Once upon a time there was a woman who drank three gallons (7 liters) of water, and we mean she gulped down that amount in just two hours. Why would she do such a thing, you might ask?
Well, the same reason why people eat 50 hot dogs in one sitting. It was in the spirit of competition.
You see, the 28-year old woman in question – Jennifer – had joined a radio station competition
called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii”, with the prize being Nintendo’s games console. All the
contestants had to do was drink this huge amount of water and the last person not to pee was the
winner. Was this a dangerous thing to do? A caller certainly felt so, calling in and telling the radio
station that the competition should be called off. All 10 employees at the station just shrugged off
the warning
Jennifer took this competition seriously and she imbibed almost 3 gallons. This was Herculean of her, and most of the other contestants dropped out early. One man said after the competition, “My bladder couldn’t handle it anymore.” He quit. The others were given bigger bottles of water.
So far, so good, and just after she drank her last gulp, she even joked that she “looked pregnant again.” Only shortly after she had finished her superhuman drink of water, and almost won the competition (she came second), she said she felt really, really nauseous, so much so she could barely move from her chair. Her husband thought it best to drive her home so she could rest, but in the car, she complained of a mammoth, skull-crushing headache. She cried, saying her brain felt like it was coming out of her skull, and worse, she said her vision in one eye had just about gone. She and her husband believed that the faster they get home the better and that she just needed to lie down and get some sleep.
They arrive home, and it’s now been a few hours since she took her last drink. The weird thing is, she still doesn’t need a pee. Jennifer goes to bed, while her husband prepares dinner for the family. When dinner is ready, he doesn’t wake her up, thinking it better she sleep-off that terrible headache. Unbeknownst to him, she is suffering from a series of seizures in the bedroom. She’s not sleeping now, she’s unconscious.
Finally, the husband thinks it’s been too long and goes to the bedroom to wake Jennifer up, only when he gets there he sees she is unconscious, and even witnesses her having another seizure. Now, there are many versions of this story in the news, but all versions have the same ending: sadly, she died. Whether that was in the ambulance, or in the bedroom, or in the bathroom, we don’t know; all we know is that she died.
What!? You might ask, died from just 3 gallons (7 liters) of water. Yes, and it’s called water toxicity. It happened to a 17-year old just a few years ago in the U.S. He drank two liters of water and two liters of Gatorade after football practice. He dropped dead on the way to the hospital in a helicopter, from the same thing, sometimes called overhydration.
In the UK in the 90s, there was another similar, famous case. A young woman had gone to a rave and taken the drug ecstasy. She had heard that when you do that, you sweat a lot and it can be dangerous, so you have to drink a lot of water to stay hydrated. She drank 3 gallons (7 liters) of water in about 90 minutes and soon collapsed into a coma. The press jumped on the story saying she had died because of illicit drugs, but an inquest revealed it was the water that did it, not the drugs.
But why do people die from drinking too much?
Well, over-drinking – and it has to be really large amounts – changes the electrolytes in your body, reducing how much salt, or sodium you have in you. This is called “dilutional hyponatremia.” The latter word basically translates from Greek and Latin as “insufficient salt in the blood.” When it’s severe, it’s what we call water toxicity. You should have anywhere from 135 and 145 millimoles of blood sodium per liter, and if it drops below that, you are in trouble.
Usually, your kidneys help you out by sieving water, or other liquids, as well as salt, through the body. But play a game like hold your wee for Wii and you are basically overwhelming your kidneys, water-logging them, and they can’t do their job. You are flooding your blood with water. Your brains cells swell as water is pushed into them, and, we all know there’s not much room to swell up there.
When this happens, the first thing is you feel sick, or confused, as happened to Jennifer. Those unbelievable headaches she was having in the car were because her brain was swelling. The next thing is usually seizures, followed by coma and death.
Doctors tell us that this can even happen to people running marathons, so you’ve really got to watch out for how much water you are drinking. It might also happen over a long period of time, not just guzzling down loads of water or any drink quickly. But how do you know how much to drink, so you don’t overdo it? One scientist put it like this, “Drink to your thirst. It’s the best indicator.”
As for poor Jennifer’s grief-stricken family, they were awarded $16.5 million in compensation. It seems the disc jockey and staff were just very ignorant. During the competition, someone had said, “Are you sure this isn’t dangerous?” The DJ replied, “Not with water. Your body is 98 percent water. Why can’t you take in as much water as you want?” Oh, how we wish he had seen this show first. They were all fired, of course.
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