Out of the frying pan...

So I almost died of heat stroke on Tuesday afternoon.

After going for 5 days without air conditioning in this house, and not being able to sleep a wink because of the crushing heat, my body finally started to shut down on me when the house temperature got around 98 degrees.

First thing I noticed was that I wasn't breathing right and getting very dizzy. All of a sudden, I got tunnel vision, which quickly turned to total blackout and I passed out on the couch. I don't know how long I was out, but I remember realizing that I wasn't breathing and I forced myself awake somehow by sitting up... but as soon as I did that, the tunnel vision zoomed me out and I blacked out again.

I came to quicker the second time and crawled upstairs, thinking that a cold shower might lower my body temperature faster, since drinking water was no longer helping. I wasn't thinking that the temp in my windowless bathroom would be about 10 degrees hotter than it was downstairs, so despite the cold water pouring on me, my lungs just couldn't seem to get enough oxygen, my heart was struggling, my arms were going numb, and the tunnel vision was getting worse.

I got out before I blacked out again and went downstairs to the freezer, looking for an icepack to put on the back of my neck, to cool the blood flow to my brain. As I stood there confused and out of it with the freezer door open, I began to realize that breathing the frosty air was helping. So I stood like that with as much of my upper body in the freezer as possible for about 5 or 10 minutes.

While in there, I spotted a 6 year old box of frozen Pedialyte pops. Knowing that I needed electrolytes badly, I cut one of them open and sucked it down while keeping a freezer pack on my neck. That did the trick at last... the tunnel vision went away and my body and brain seemed to be returning to normal... well, as normal as I can get.

That was, to say the least, a very frightening experience. I have a mild heart condition and I guess it was tested to the limits and the ticker was giving up on me. I didn't see any dead relatives while I was passed out... just a voice in the blackness that screamed, "WAKE UP AND BREATHE!" If that hadn't happened, I'm not sure if I'd be here now. Seriously.

In the time going from the shower to the freezer, I managed to call my father. He later told me that he was the one who directed me to the freezer (which explained why I found my cell phone in there that evening). He also told me to put something cold on the carotid arteries in my neck and to look for Gatorade or anything to replenish my electrolytes. I don't remember the conversation at all... he says that I was almost completely incoherent... barely stringing 2 or 3 words together and hardly able to speak above a whisper. If I hadn't been compelled to call him (and I almost never call him, that's the odd part), I'm not sure that I would have made it after the shower either.

The good news is that while I was going through all that, there was a guy under my house installing the new compressor and coil... so by later that night, I had a cool house again. Of course, it's not working correctly now and I have to have them come out to take a look at it in a few hours.

The other semi-shitty news is that I found my water heater leaking a steady stream into my laundry room and had created quite a decent sized and quickly expanding puddle at 4 AM this morning. I guess the good thing about my insomnia is that I am guaranteed to be up at that time and thus I caught this leak before it spread through the whole laundry room and into my office, where thousands of dollars in computer equipment might have been damaged. I turned off the water going into the tank and the leak stopped for now... but it means I need to get yet another repair guy out here to fix this latest disaster.

This "good catch" has left me rethinking my set up here and making me wonder if there's a way for me to reconfigure my office so that the equipment is up off the floor, what with this being the lowest level of the house and all.

Man, am I exhausted right now and feel like I could go right to sleep. I wonder if my pilot light got washed out? Crap. I have no idea how to check that, but I better go look into that before I'm blacking out again from a gas leak.