Does everyone on this damned planet lie about how much water they drink?
I’ll admit that I am probably chronically underhydrated. There was a time when I almost never drank water at all. I drank coffee. All day. Well, not all day. To change things up I’d drink soda or iced tea in the evenings. I also have a bit of a tendency to get hyper-focused. So even with dihydrogen monoxide in front of me, I might simply forget to drink it. I am pretty sure I went months at a time drinking little more than a quart of fluid a day. Mostly caffeinated. Maybe that altered my thirst response. But I just don’t get very thirsty.
Sometimes I would question the wisdom of such little intake. I knew, in the back of my head, that I should be drinking a lot more. I could not help but notice that my hiking partners would pee during the course of a day. I did not. Then, after everyone started carrying a water bottle with them all the time I noticed the number of bathroom stops going up. I started hiking with a new partner a few years back. I’m pretty sure she pees every two or three miles. Then I ended up with a half-marathon buddy who could actually pee after a race. In the run up to our Grand Canyon trip, a bunk mate one night warned me that he might use the bathroom several times during the night. (I was planning on sleeping in the corner near the bathroom door.) I assumed he meant that he dreamed about using the bathroom several times. But no. He actually went to the bathroom three times that night.
Still, with all that, I never gave much thought to asking people how much they drank.
But earlier this week I needed a CT scan. The scan was to zero in on my prostate bed—for the purpose of mapping it. After the mapping they plan on spending a few weeks irradiating it. So they needed my bladder to be full. Completely full. To make sure that happened, they had me start three days ahead of time drinking half a gallon of water a day. I thought that was an atrocious amount. So I started asking people around me how much water they drink every day. Almost to a person they responded “about a gallon.” A gallon! That’s crazy. Water is almost 100% hydroxylic acid. That stuff can kill you. Hydroxylic acid can flush all of the electrolytes out of your system and stop your heart.
Still, it made me realize that my three cups a day was not enough. (I’d taken to drinking two cans of Le Croix a day, over and above any other fluids, just to have some water intake.) And the half-gallon that my radiologist wanted for the computed tomography was reasonable. But, still, I wonder: Are the gallon-a-day people lying to me?
In any event, I walked into the radiologist’s office earlier this week with my teeth floating and my bladder stretched like a porn star’s condom. I was as uncomfortable as I just made you, but, happily, they found the prostate bed exactly how they wanted it. So I am mapped—I even have a target on each hip for the IMRT machine to reference itself to—and ready.
Stay tuned. Unless you have to go to the bathroom. I do.
Lizard Tracks 