Today I saw something miraculous: my grandmother who appeared to be on her death bed 3 days ago, is now energetic and vibrant. And all because of… water.

You see, she wasn’t drinking enough water, and what happened? She got sick. She became weak, she couldn’t stand up without getting dizzy, she felt like she wanted to sleep all the time. And, to tell you the truth, she looked like she was getting ready to die. She was even talking about her loved ones “on the other side.” So you can see how my family and I were getting pretty nervous.

Now, in all fairness, it turned out there was more going on than just dehydration — but they were all related! By not drinking enough water, my grandmother’s lungs weren’t as moist as they should be, so she wasn’t clearing out the mucus the way she was supposed to, and she ended up with a case of pneumonia. The other thing that happened was that, because there wasn’t enough fluid to properly move her immune cells around, she caught a stomach virus. So now she was in a situation where dehydration was causing problems, but the problems were also causing dehydration. She was caught in a vicious cycle. And to make matters worse, she has Alzheimer’s Dementia so we couldn’t even tell her about her need to drink because she would just forget 2 minutes later.

Now it turns out that there are all sorts of reasons that elderly persons can become dehydrated. According to Dr. Monique Ferry in last year’s June issue of Nutrition Reviews, the top reasons are: a decreased sense of thirst, dehydrating medications, cognitive disorders, reduced appetite, swallowing problems, reduced access to drink, communication problems, dehydrating medical problems, and incapable or unaware caregivers.

Now in my grandmother’s case, she had almost all of these problems. So it’s no big surprise that she became dehydrated. Oh yeah, don’t forget that the temperature here in the big apple was in the 90s for the preceding few days.

So what could we have done to prevent it? Well to start off, we need to know how much water she needed. According to the US National Research Council, elderly persons need 1 ounce of water for every kilogram (or 2.2 pounds), so that works out to eight 8-ounce glasses (64 ounces total) of water a day for an elderly person weighing 141 pounds. If they weigh more, they need more.

When I talked to my grandfather about how much my grandmother was drinking, he told me “a sip here and there.” After examining her, and getting all of the details from my grandfather, I determined that she needed to be in the hospital for intravenous hydration.

When she got to the hospital, they did a quick blood test (BUN and Creatinine) that showed that she was extremely dehydrated — so much so that they thought that she was in kidney failure. Now for this to happen, the body has to lose an incredible amount of fluid. It has to pull all of the water out of its reserves in the body and then lose more on top of that. So it’s no wonder that she felt like dying — her blood was literally toxic because all of her waste products were concentrated in there.

Well, 3 days and 3 liters of fluid later, my grandmother is her spry, albeit crotchety, old self. And my grandfather and her home nurse have learned a very valuable lesson about water.

Now if they could only release her from the hospital so that she doesn’t have to ask us every 2 minutes what she’s doing there!

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