Ever heard of waterintoxication?

Nurses General Nursing

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This week a man was admitted to the ward where I work with waterintoxication. When I heard of this I was like what? Apparently he suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder and he wouldn´t stop drinking water. His electrolytes were waay low.. Ever heard of this?

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Yep. It's even possible to put someone in that condition, if you run too many bags of saline in wide open without paying attention....especially in babies.

There was a case in CA last year, a radio station held a contest to see who could drink the most and hold their pee the longest. The woman who won was found dead in her apartment. She was water intoxicated.

Think of it this way: sodium depletion. So much water on board that you deplete your sodium.

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Specializes in Periop, CNOR.

Absolutely. It can be fatal. I don't recall how long ago, but it was fairly recent that a woman participating in a radio station contest for a video game died from drinking a huge amount of water. Try THIS LINK

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Oh yeah. A woman in this country recently died from it during a contest to win a Wii.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16614865/

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This week a man was admitted to the ward where I work with waterintoxication. When I heard of this I was like what? Apparently he suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder and he wouldn´t stop drinking water. His electrolytes were waay low.. Ever heard of this?

Yep.

In one case, we had to have all water cut off to the room; otherwise she would drink from the toilet.

Another, even sadder case was a young girl (mid-teens) from back in the mountains; very poor, illiterate, backwoods, superstitious family.

Her mother found out she'd kissed a boy and forced her to drink gallons of distilled water to wash the devil out of her. She lived, but that was about it. Totally unresponsive, vegetative, severely brain damaged. The mother would come visit, and start wailing and literally smack the child with a Bible, praying for the devil to release her daughter. She never understood that she was at fault for what happened; she was convinced her daughter was possessed by evil. It was one of the most un-nerving things I've ever witnessed. The mother was charged, but I don't know if she was ever convicted.

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Another, even sadder case was a young girl (mid-teens) from back in the mountains; very poor, illiterate, backwoods, superstitious family.

Her mother found out she'd kissed a boy and forced her to drink gallons of distilled water to wash the devil out of her. She lived, but that was about it. Totally unresponsive, vegetative, severely brain damaged. The mother would come visit, and start wailing and literally smack the child with a Bible, praying for the devil to release her daughter. She never understood that she was at fault for what happened; she was convinced her daughter was possessed by evil. It was one of the most un-nerving things I've ever witnessed. The mother was charged, but I don't know if she was ever convicted.

Oh my........I guess I'm naive, I didn't realize that this was still around in the US!

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Oh my........I guess I'm naive, I didn't realize that this was still around in the US!

Yes, it is. In this same area, there were two cases of small children who died; one was forced to eat salt (his mom had caught him spilling the saltshaker and licking the salt or something like that), the other was fed pepper as a punishment for something he'd done.

Took care of a young girl with an ENORMOUS ovarian tumor (thankfully benign). Mom thought she'd become pregnant because she'd caught her swimming in the creek with some boys. She decided to midwife her daughter herself. After 10 or 11 months without giving birth, she finally decided to go to a local doc, who immediately sent her on to our gyn/onc.

I worked as an LPN while in RN school at this small hospital. The town was actually rather upscale, mostly university students and staff. But the surrounding area was dirt poor, and alot of the people who lived back in those hills were very backward and illiterate, paranoid and superstitious (most of which was religious based, but was so out there I'm not even sure you could call it 'fundamentalism') It wasn't uncommon to see stuff like that; one of my fellow LPN-to-RN students worked that ER. The stories she had would curl your hair.

(sorry. didn't mean to hijack the thread)

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Specializes in NP / USAFR Flight Nurse.

Fluid volume overload...

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This is actually relatively common especially near universities. Many initiations involve drinking gallons of water and I think I read about 1 or 2 people dying a year from this. The last one I heard about was that women trying to win the Wii.

These patients will present often with seizures or are comatose so the initial diagnosis can be misleading. Generally they will have massive amounts of output and their electrolytes will be out of whack but check the serum osmolality. It will be decreased with water intoxication and I think increased with Diabetes inspidious.

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I went looking for an article about a college student near here who nearly died from water intoxication and was surprised at the large numbers of articles there are.

Click here to see them all.

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The official term is; dilutional hyponatremia. It is a common problem for those doing intense work in hot conditions (firefighters, marathon runners, etc.), who drink large amounts of water without eating. This is actually why Gatorade was developed.

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