Ray Jordan South Carolina 6 year old boy hospitalized after drinking 6 bottles of water in one hour, depleting blood sodium levels and nearly killing boy.
That was some thirst! A South Carolina boy is lucky to still be alive after intoxicating on water after downing six bottles of water in under an hour amid sweltering hot temperatures.
Ray Jordan, 10, was playing with friends outside in Columbia for the Fourth of July holiday weekend after having drunk the fluids when he suddenly began to exhibit distressing symptoms.
Within an hour of guzzling the water, the boy begin to violently convulse, leading to the boy’s parents fearing the worse.
Within an hour 10 year old’s body began to shut down
‘(Ray) couldn’t control his head or arms or anything,’ his dad Jeff Jordan told WIS-TV. ‘His motor functions were gone.’
Its unclear what size the bottles of water Ray drank were.
The 10-year-old has since thankfully made a full recovery, but his parents’ warnings serve as a reminder to others over the dangers presented by the hot summer months.
Ray’s parents said in the hours before their son was hospitalized, Ray was going ‘full throttle’ with his cousins, ‘running circles around the house, a bunch of boys together, jumping on the trampoline’.
However, his mom Stacy said after some time he became thirsty, and had ran inside to get himself some water.
‘What we didn’t realize how much he had got,’ she added, as it was later discovered that he had downed six bottles from 8:30 to 9:30pm.
Within an hour, his father Jeff says the boy ‘couldn’t control his head or arms or anything’, and his ‘motor functions were gone.’
What is water intoxication and when does it occur?
‘It almost seemed like he was on drugs, drunk, or even mentally handicapped,’ mom, Stacy said.
As panic set in, the 10-year-old was rushed to Prisma Health Children’s Hospital.
There, emergency tests were run on Ray. and it was found he was suffering from ‘water intoxication’.
The medical crisis occurs when the kidney’s can’t handle a large amount of water flooding in at once, resulting in critically low sodium levels in the blood.
‘They were giving him something to help him urinate as much as possible to get those fluids out because it was swelling around his brain — that was why his head was hurting so much,’ Stacey added.
After some further procedures including regulating his blood with renewed sodium and potassium levels, his mother recalled that he miraculously ‘just woke up’.
The importance of electrolytes
Ray’s close call according to the boy’s parents should serve as a cautionary tale to other parents who wouldn’t know the dangers to look out for.
‘It never would have even occurred to us that it was dangerous,’ the parents said.
The couple also insisted that the crisis could have been avoided by switching water with sports drinks.
Health authorities recommend alternating between water and drinks such as Gatorade on hot days to battle dehydration, because the electrolytes in sports drinks don’t dilute blood sodium levels.
