“Drink more water” is the catch phrase of well-wishers everywhere. And they’re right. For most of us, we really CAN drink MORE water – and SHOULD. Our bodies are made of it, they need it, and the ‘dryer’ we get, the unhealthier we become.
I want to demonstrate what goes wrong when we get dehydrated with an anecdote from my bad migraine-days. The migraine was a #9 on my 1 to 10 pain-scale. As I tell the story, try to count how many ‘triggers’ I accidentally built into the day; all the reasons that I inadvertently increased my chance of getting sick. It involves a couple of references to the ‘messy’ details of what happens when you get a bad migraine, so feel free to miss it if you want.
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Here’s the story: It was a couple of days before Christmas (so Summer in Australia). We had a 5 hour drive to go to my parent’s farm to meet the family, so we decided to get up a few hours earlier than normal. Because the kids tend to fall asleep in the car, it works better if we don’t stop too often, so I made sure not to drink too much before we left. We were keen to get going, so we minimized breakfast as well, and figured we would eat on the way. We stopped to have a break halfway, and again, I minimized how much I had to drink so I wouldn’t need to stop again. When we arrived at the farm, my 2 sisters and their 7 kids were all there; it was joyous, raucous noise and activity. Summer on the farm gets to around 40 degrees C (or 104F) and the day was already heating up. As we were unloading the car, my mother handing me a cup of coffee which I happily drank. Within the hour I was in bed with one of my worst migraines ever. Over the next three days, I had recurring bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, and struggled to keep down water, food or medicine. By the third day (Christmas morning) I sat in the lounge room watching the kids unwrap their presents and started to tremble. My entire body began ‘quivering’ – not a violent seizure-like shaking, just an all over shimmy-shake that I couldn’t stop. I was struggling to stay lucid, but I could hear the adults discussing what to do, and it was decided I should go to hospital whether I wanted to or not. My dad carried me to the car, and my husband and mother drove me to hospital, where I was taken quickly through triage and into a ward where I was put on a drip. I remember listening to my mother ask “why is she shaking? She’s never done that before.” And the nurse replied; “she’s dehydrated on a cellular level – her organs are shutting down.” An hour on the drip and I was feeling better, another one or two hours later and the three-day-long-raging-pain was completely gone as if it had been an imagined dream. I asked, “what’s in that drip and how can I get some to take home?” The nurse laughed and replied it was a “cocktail” of different medications and wandered off. I went back to the farm, and we enjoyed a couple more days, where I drank lots of water and we went home, with lots of stops along the way.
Phew! If you’re still here, well done – that was longer than I intended!
So – here’s a list of all the things that went wrong: I got up earlier than normal and missed my regular sleep, I skipped breakfast, I didn’t drink enough water on the trip, the first big drink I did have was coffee on an empty stomach not water, all the vomiting and diarrhea made the dehydration worse, as did the high temperatures or where we were staying.
In hindsight, I’m not surprised that I was sick. It’s a bit like when they talk about a plane crash rarely being one big mistake, rather it is an accumulation of minor mistakes. It’s not just the bad weather, or the pilot being fatigued, or an electrical malfunction, or it being the co-pilot’s first day – any of which on their own is manageable – it’s the ‘perfect storm’ of all the little things going wrong simultaneously that creates the disaster.
It’s a long story (sorry), but an important reminder that “drink more water” isn’t just a trite expression – hydration really, cellularly, makes a difference to your health and wellbeing.
How much water is enough is debatable. I’ve heard 8 glasses as the recurring number – but how large is the glass? I think it’s more personal and contextual than a strict number. What you need differs on who you are, where you are and what you’re doing. I do know however that there’s an icky-but-quicky way of checking if you’re getting enough water: the color of your wee.
(Image source: (3) Healthline on X: “Not sure if your pee is the right color? Urine luck! We have a graphic to help. 🍋🍺🚽 )
If today’s post wasn’t grim enough – stay tuned for later in the week when I discuss the even grimmer part two of the hydration model: what goes in must come out!
Take care and stay hydrated, Linda x
The Mindful Migraine 
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