Water, Water, Everywhere…
I want a Wii for Christmas. Hopefully, by the time this is published, my wish will have been granted, either by Santa or by some other divine entity (*cough* my wife, *cough cough*). I want to use it mainly as an addition to my regular exercise regimen, but also for the obvious entertainment purposes. Because of that, I’ve noticed how difficult it is to get your hands on the system for Christmas, even nearly three years after it was announced. The PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 are easily found in stock at many outlets in comparison to their Nintendo counterpart, perhaps painfully reminding both Sony and Microsoft that the Wii is still king. To read more about the Wii’s dominant position as a game console in the US, click here.
The name, of course, lends itself to all kinds of plays on the word, which reminded me of a story in January 2007 where a woman died from a water overdose when trying to compete to win a Wii system. A quick search on Google lead me to the article on the guardian.co.uk site entitled, “Water overdose kills woman in Wii challenge.” If you hadn’t heard this story before, you should probably file it under your “strange but true” trivia that you can recite at dinner parties. Jennifer Strange, 28 years old, was taking part in a competition sponsored by a local radio station called “hold your wee for a Wii,” for which the grand prize was a Wii gaming system. The mother-of-three, with her fellow contestants, started off by drinking an eight-ounce bottle of water every 15 minutes. As the competition wore on, the bottles grew larger, but the sponsors encouraged contestants to drop out if they felt they were putting their health at risk.
Strange, trying to win the system for her kids, complained of a severe headache at the end of the contest. Unbeknownst to hear, she was suffering from water intoxication, a condition in which sodium in the blood is diluted by an excess of water in the system. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting and headache. The most severe cases involve brain swelling that can lead to confusion, seizures and even, in Strange’s case, death.
I am a pretty healthy individual, and have always been of the opinion that water was good for me, but I had no idea such a condition existed. I remember easily downing a half-gallon of water after some basketball games in intense heat in my youth, but usually not more than that. Needless to say, since I’ve read the article it’s always stuck in the back of my mind as something of which I should be aware when my exercise gets that demanding on my body.
And given that this was such a highly-publicized death, I was surprised to see that, yet again, someone has recently died of water intoxication, as reported on the BBC web site on December 11, 2008. Jackie Henson, another mother of three, was attempting to lose some weight and read that drinking more water would help along her weight loss and allow her to look good more quickly. Though the program she was following did warn of the dangers of drinking too much water, she did just that and paid the ultimate price for it.
I don’t think there should necessarily be a global “water intoxication” campaign, as this kind of problem just isn’t something that happens all that often yet, but I’m definitely more of an advocate now of telling people to pay attention to the signals their bodies are giving them when there’s too much of something they’re using. We know when we’re eating too much food, and generally we know when we’re having too much alcohol, but too much water? Who ever thought there was such a thing?
Hydration is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves, and it is far more important to us than any food we can put in our system (I’ve heard we can survive for many more days without food than we can without water). But, like with anything, there is a balance we must maintain to ensure optimal health. Our bodies are amazing in that that balance isn’t so delicate, and it can generally adapt quickly when we have too much or too little of something. But we should work hard to educate ourselves, pay attention to the messages that our body is sending us, and make sure that we never accidentally push that balance to the point of no return.
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