A South Carolina boy was rushed to hospital suffering water intoxication after he downed six bottles of water in under an hour on a sweltering hot day.
Ray Jordan, 10, was playing with friends outside in Columbia for the Fourth of July holiday weekend when he almost lost his life.
Within an hour of guzzling the water, the boy was showing disturbing symptoms that left his parents fearing the worst.
‘(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.
The boy’s brush with death came while he, like millions of other Americans, was enjoying the hot weather for the Fourth of July festivities.
His parents said in the hours before he was hospitalized, an excited 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.’
As the reality of the situation set in, the parents added that Ray was seemingly deteriorating, and he ‘almost seemed like he was on drugs, drunk, or even mentally handicapped’.
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’.
Without knowing how close he had come to perilously endangering his own health, the mother added that Ray woke up by saying: ‘Where am I? What happened?’
His relieved parents added that Ray has since made a full recovery and has no ongoing side effects.
