In other words, an elevated potassium level.
I’ve been a bit under the weather for a couple of weeks. A few days before my drive to New Jersey I had a bout of dizziness and tinnitus, my doctor gave me a prescription for it. I checked for interactions with my beta blocker blood pressure medication when I got home and saw that there was a warning related to the combination of the two meds. Apparently the two meds cause the body to not process or remove potassium and while it’s possible to combine them it’s not normally done. I called the doctor to confirm that he intended me to take both meds and he told me to go ahead so I did. I first noticed the achy muscles on the drive to New Jersey but I attributed it to sitting in the car for 13 hours. On the Saturday at the show I became fatigued and had to go sit in the car for 45 minutes or so around noon but I attributed that to being on my feet since 7am. I fell asleep at 9pm that night, awoke refreshed and had no issues on the drive home. Work has been very busy since I returned and I noticed I was arriving home fatigued and with occasional numbness in my fingers accompanying burning, achy muscles so I researched the effects of too much potassium. Bingo, all the symptoms. I thought I would stick it out until the weekend but I was so fatigued on Saturday that I did little but sleep. I discontinued the inner ear medication and I’ve been trying to recover. I thought I was back to about 75% but I had to actually exert myself doing some testing this week and I felt all the symptoms return. Muscle pain, fatigue, loss of feeling in my fingers. Even just typing this now has the muscles in my forearms burning. There’s not much I can do to get the potassium out of my system other than to drink plenty of water and flush it out.
Just a small factoid: In the USA, capital punishment by lethal injection is accomplished by inducing a fatal level of hyperkalemia through the injection of potassium chloride.
In the meantime, I successfully covered 1605 miles from South Carolina to New Jersey and back between that Friday morning and the following Sunday night. One of my models was selected to be photographed for a magazine but I was recovering in my car and missed the photo shoot. Met several people I only know from online and really enjoyed the trip. I did have issues with the corroded connector I wrote about in my last issue, I had to crawl under the car twice to clean the contacts again. I have purchased a new wiring harness section and as soon as I use most of the fuel out of this tankful I’ll drop the tank enough to swap out the harness. The ten year old Aztek covered the distance at over 30 MPG.
The gun I’ve been working on at work was selected as one of the entries to move on to Phase II of the Army’s evaluation. That means we have to submit additional testing so I spent today with a couple of other engineers dunking a prototype in a water tank then lifting it out of the tank and firing it under various conditions within three seconds of the gun coming out of the water. The Mythbuster guys don’t have crap on us lol. |
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