ORS (oral rehydration solutions/salts): The home recipe

Interesting, YG. Had you been drinking normal daily quantities for that week? Perhaps your body, which would also have been confused by the sudden return from a moderately hot to a very cold climate, wasn't yet able to balance properly on its own.

I conjecture wildly, of course!

Tap water? If it works for you, sure! Whatever each individual person's system is used to is going to be just fine for them, I guess.

Thanks Aishah. The 4 year old has already bounced back. First time he has been sick since we arrived almost a year ago (I have a theory that virulent germs and toddlers extend a sort of "professional courtesy" towards each other - they are equally destructive so instead of fighting each other they concentrate on helpless victims).

Our 11 year old is a different story. Threw up 5 times today but we saw the doctor this morning who said he was clearly not dehydrated. We've now got the anti-nausea medicine which has calmed the stomach and helping to get some gastrolyte and water into him. We shall see.

You mean there's a cure for it?! I've been feeling like that every morning since becoming a parent! Damn - I could have saved myself a fortune in coffee.

oh....and of course I had to look up discombobulated to find out what it means....

yes, I was drinking lots of liquids. water, juices, but I still felt incredibly thirsty, so who knows? after that 2nd IV I was fine. I did notice that the bag here was larger than the one I had in Chennai, twice the amount of liquid. and they made it drip faster! did not have stay there for 2 hours...

you mean you actually found a definition for it?

yeah.....with the advent of the internet even complete word Neanderthals like moi can look smart.....hopefully......maybe once or twice......

As a diabetic, I can assure you that 8 teaspoons of sugar is a definite NO!

was wondering about that (got a few friends who are diabetic - and that struck me as a lot of sugar). Thanks goangoangone.

Nick and Yogagal - You both have been through the wars - is it something in Chennai you can put your finger on?? Did you get sick at the same time? Also all your symptoms etc. are really useful information for signs of dehydration. Some I didn't know about. Very helpful posts here.
bb - hope your 11 yr old gets better soon. These things just come out of the blue sometimes and you are never sure how they start. Actually, I think I used to get more sick back in Oz than here!

Handy tip there, thanks, didn't know about it. Sounds good. Would ginger beer help, you think? (That's a non-alcoholic drink, btw. Don't know why this isn't served in India, it's delicious and very refreshing and easy to make at home. There are commercial brands which can't beat the real thing though.)



My advise would be don't leave it. A pointless visit beats carrying something around unnoticed, and if anything, it'll be on your file should you develop something over the coming (longer) time.

Other symptoms I know of, they have been disputed here before (and nothing to do with diarrhea, just means you're drinking too little): Peeing infrequently and/or noticably hot/dark/smelly pee (How does that happen? Because it's getting to be very concentrated.) Up your fluids intake immediately.

May take you a while to get into this. But do persist. Conversely, returning from having lived in the tropics to a colder climate, I'd need to go to the bathroom all the time. In other words, you're used to drinking a lot, so this also takes some time to unlearn.

By the time you're starting to experience drowsiness, general fuzziness etc., you should definitely be upping your fluids intake. And maybe lessen your activities and seek out the shadow more, if you can.

Cold water is said to be not so good no, room temperature is better. That said, where I lived we went through countless jars of ice water (simply refrigerated water) each day, and had cold soft drinks and ice tea and so on at the ready all the time. I never realized but maybe the sugars under those circumstances were not just a coincidence. We didn't have so many iffy diseases flying about though, and drank distilled sea water, about the cleanest in the world or so they say.

To BB and others fighting this or that: Good luck with it. Let us know how it works out, BB.

ps

Funny, that's the way I remember it too re: the salt vs. sugar ratio. But all the recipes I've ever looked up on it later have it the other way around. Confusing, isn't it. I suppose heaps of salt would be contraindicated in case of high blood pressure problems and the likes, btw.

I just caught one of those miscellaneous flu-type bugs. I get about the same number of those as I ever did; Chennai doesn't make a difference!

Actually, YG caught her stomach bug in Kochi, so Chennai wasn't implicated in that either.

By the time this sort of thing starts, you are ill already! And need to take the situation very seriously indeed.

There is not just the hydration matter, there is also heat shock to be considered --- I seem to remember that we did a good thread on this a year or so ago.

Catch your body's early warning signs, and a day off in an AC room with normal fluid intake will have you right again. Ignore it and you could end up in hospital.

Absolutely.

Years ago, my five year old daughter had 105F temp in Lucknow, vomiting, dehydrated... and the only way we could get back to Hyderabad was by train.

We were very concerned with lack of medical facilities en route, and we stocked up.

But, an hour after she got into the airconditioned compartment, her temperature started dropping, and by the time we reached Hyderabad, her temperature was back to normal, and stayed there.

Aishah, I had salmonella food poisoning, gotten from a "jam cake", NOT any type of indian food, so it was a lot more than an upset stomach!

when I was back home I described my symptoms and how they came on to my dr. and she said "classic salmonella" and that what I ate is a "classic carrier" of salmonella - a pastry with a creamy center.

I survived indian street food and a cake kicks my butt....

I got violently ill at about 2 am on a Sat. morning and that Sat. night I was able to get the rehydration salts and they helped tremendously....let's say I was up all that night worshiping the Porcelain God and in between bouts of projectile vomiting and uh...otherwise....I was drinking water with the salts and they helped a lot for me to be able to leave a day earlier from cochin and fly back to chennai.

Thanks Nick and YogaGal for clarifications - also I shall now avoid those cream centre cakes! Sound positively lethal.
Heat shock - absolutely Nick. Year before last a boy and his girlfriend went out to the desert in extreme heat, despite warnings. In the space of that day out, by evening he was 'raving', thinking he was going to die etc. With urgent medical attention, he was fine the next day. Paracetamol btw is great for bringing down temps. rapidly.

Stay away from that street food - you're throwing the dice with that khanna and sooner or later you'll roll(toss?) 'snake eyes'. Some of the better hotels have descent european pastrie shops with proper refridgeration/climate(& reliable backup power) control - the Intercontinental in Delhi comes to mind.

Not that I'm advocating this, but:
My wife who is American makes it a point to consume a large quantity of Gol Gappas (Pani Puris) within 24 hours of landing in Delhi. She has done this about 10 times over the past 15 years, as a wierd ritual - part defiance, part a mistaken belief (she knows this all too well) that it gets something that is necessary and inevitable out of the way. She then proceeds to eat street food in vast quantities for the next few weeks.

Never had a stomach bug!

Like I said, thsi strategy is not only fallible but is also foolhardy.It just happens to work for my wife.