Making Peace with Natural Death A Hard Lesson in Hyponatremia TPS-0028

At this moment I’m surviving health conditions at my experimental research project, off grid, off road in the mountains, in the desert, in the peak of summer temperatures, with some heat wave levels that are happening around the world.

Generally, my high temperatures are above those numbers, and they have been for weeks and will remain so for weeks.

This is the second year of being relatively primitively sheltered from those temperatures around the clock and hacking the survival skills to stay alive and adapt. To Learn how to cope with some of the extremes.

It's a scary process, because encountering conditions that you've never encountered before, doing it alone, relying on your medical survival reference manuals and training up to this point, you can only hope for the best.

It’s been a path of just extremely minimizing risk as much as possible, minimizing exposure to direct sunlight.

Then working on these different Macgyver type science experiment hacks to stay buffered from the extreme heat enough to where the body does its magic to maintain core temperature within a range that doesn't end up going from heat exhaustion to heat stroke, along with number of other associated issues and conditions that can arise along that continuum.

What I learned last year and what I'm experiencing again this year is that from somewhere around mid June to late August ish, it's pretty much chronic, 24/7 unavoidable, around the clock heat exhaustion symptoms they have to be constantly mitigated.

I was just reading an old Army survival field manual, and interestingly enough, I'm doing just about exactly what was recommended a hundred years ago.

This was a manual from the 1940s basically saying that soldiers are gonna do their best to wear lighter fabrics and have lighter loads. But eventually the heat will catch up to them. And if they experience the symptoms of heat exhaustion leading to heat stroke, then because heat stroke requires even more extreme interventions, and I'm aware of what to look out for, mainly the drying up of sweat.

Basically being unable to sweat, an increasing intensity of a lot of the other milder symptoms of heat exhaustion, including things like dizziness, nausea, dry mouth and cognitive impairment.

My indicator is, am I still generating moisture on the surface of my skin?

Is two and two, still four and stuff like that. But their recommendation, or their strategy, knowing that they did not have access in the field to air conditioned med tents or field hospitals, or established hospitals.

They were taking off their clothes, dousing with water, and then fanning, preferably with an electric fan.

So basically, they described my entire lifestyle, however, I douse myself with water in a controlled manner with spray bottles and damp cloths and of course, the first element of that strategy was being put in the shade.

That's what they did to stay alive in the field almost a hundred years ago. And there were no other options. That was the only way that was put in the survival manual for extreme weather conditions in operations.

Something that you wouldn't do if you didn’t have the water to spare. A lot of times, hikers get stranded with no water anywhere.

That's a much more dangerous situation. I don't see myself as a very bold remote hiking adventurer where I wanna be in a situation where I'm far away from my supplies or far away from an organization that's going to deliver supplies to whoever is in the field. Even if they're on a singleton mission, as it were.

But in my situation, this is a remote, off grid, off off road, solo homestead outside of the golden hour of access to emergency medical care from the outside world.

So it just means being very reserved and trying to moderate behavior according to the extremes.

Unfortunately, despite all my best efforts and the cumulative knowledge that I have built up, everything that you have learned about the extreme conditions is applicable for strategies to mitigate those extreme conditions, and those strategies work until they don't.

And what you know about your limits, your ability to adjust to things, it works until it doesn't.

It's just a very magical, miraculous process that there's so many almost infinite processes of physiological intelligence and adaptation that are happening at all times in the body, just under normal temperatures, under normal conditions of hydration and nutrition and stress and rest.

When all of those factors are thrown off in extreme conditions of climate, without being in a controlled experiment, in a hospital with all kinds of equipment and all kinds of doctors doing all kinds of tests all the time...

I've been in those medical studies where that is the exact setup. They’re trying to isolate and monitor and control and record every fluctuation of every baseline that they took from you before you took a study drug.

I'm able to contrast that level of being monitored to the total opposite, to where I'm up to doing it myself.

So in the absence of a lot of high tech equipment, it's more about the, the organic kind of indicators, just trying to maintain a large buffer between exposures and extremes.

The best indicator for myself, and of course, none of this is medical or legal advice for anybody else, but this is just me being honest about exploration.

The research I'm doing now that I'm documenting is going to serve me throughout the rest of my life.

As I continue to venture into more and more phases of deeper and deeper independence from the powers that be, the the man, the systems of support the global food supply, supply chains, and to become more and more immersed in a self made ecological balance, ecological abundance.

At this phase I'm still within range of contact and internet access so I'm still far from being fully weaned off from the system if I wanna be so daring and bold as to say, I've spent a year off road, off grid, and off line and out of coms range, that I have not done yet.

There are a lot of people who have been doing it forever.

There's a lot of people who have been doing it for decades, for generations, a lot of people who have been doing it ahead of me, maybe alone, maybe with the community, maybe with the family.

I'm still feeling like I'm in a very remedial stage of going to those extremes, where I can, if I'm experiencing something weird, medically, I can go through a decision tree about how I wanna react.

Ultimately, it would be a last resort but it’s not implausible that I would be able access a means of communication, that I could signal for an emergency medical evacuation, but obviously, for reasons of finances and pride and just not wanting to burden the system, making rookie mistakes in desert survival.

I wanna try to tough it out as much as I can.

A scenario arose, which nullified even that possibility.

So this now becomes more of a wilderness survival thriller episode.

I’m Little bit deflated as it is a “falling on the sword” experience to do a report on my failure, but also with a sense of curiosity and a sense of, well, I survived, what could have been a very catastrophic and what I would call maybe a mid-range death experience.

It wasn't far from death, it wasn't near death in the sense that my breathing stopped or my heart stopped long enough for me to see the white light and be in limbo.

I didn’t see my body from above, and wonder if I was gonna get brought back, and have an encounter with some angel who said, your work's not done, you're gonna go back, or your work is done.

It wasn't to that extreme, but so I will call it a mid-range death experience.

I would like to give myself the credit that I'm operating by the book to my knowledge, doing everything right, doing things that were successful last year and I'd like to think I'm building on the success of last year in terms of this semi controlled degree of primitive sheltering.

Being exposed to the elements, applying the strategies and the gear that's relatively low tech to be able to survive the extremes.

I did not make an egregious mistake that I feel extremely shameful about. But I encountered an X Factor, a wild card that, that was a real game changing, eye opening, mid death experience.

So a few days ago, enough days ago now to know that I seem to be in the clear.

I woke up and as I have been waking up strangely, almost every hour on the hour, save a few hours, or a couple few hours, waking up and experiencing the effect of the dilating of the capillaries of the extremities and it feels like a lot on the face.

So waking up with a really hot feeling face, almost the extremes of a feverish temperature. Just waking up uncomfortable, not feeling parched, not having a dry mouth, not out of thirst, just waking up more out of a sense of being uncomfortably hot. And even though the temperature is this lower than it is during the day, I would feel less hot during the day.

I discovered that because the body needs to actually proactively, by various means, drop the core body temperature by a couple of degrees at night in order to sleep properly...that part of the physiology to achieve that is to dilate capillaries on the surface of the skin in various places as a way to release heat from the blood by allowing it to be more freely dissolved closer to the surface of the skin.

So that is a cycle that's happening for me about every hour throughout the early morning hours of the night, waking up to a face that's uncomfortably hot, and then taking a few drinks of water, and then spraying down my head, my very short hair, the face, letting that drip down onto a towel over my pillow.

That dampness, on the towel creates a nice coolness around my head and neck.

I'm also wrapping a dampened length of sheet fabric around my neck to keep the blood cool through those highest circulation points.

I'm still able to dream, though I have interrupted R.E.M. sleep cycles but I do dream, which is enough for me to know that, it's not great, but I would be concerned if I wasn't dreaming at all.

I would take that as an indication that I'm not achieving R.E.M. sleep at all, which means I'm in trouble for functioning during the day at all.

Even worse, things could be accumulating in terms of just not not going through the full cycle at all. But I'm dreaming between every wake up cycle, which is good and it's less miserable than last year, because I'm building in more water supply than I did last year. I'm able to apply more water and not be so scarce with it.

The cooler I'm able to keep the blood through these means, the less water and therefore electrolytes I'm gonna lose through sweating it out from the inside out.

If I can continue to apply water on the surface and drink water, then I don't risk flushing out all my electrolytes.

With that strategy working well and consistently, during the cooler hours of the morning, when I when I wake up and I get up before dawn, then I have a few hours before it gets uncomfortably hot again.

And in that time, I can take that wrap off the neck, I can relax fully and just feel very grateful that there is a release, a relief from the extreme temperatures and just have a little breakfast and some tea and and relax, and listen to pods and meditate and do a little bit of shamanic drumming.

Not moving around a lot, but then obviously, watering the garden and doing whatever tasks I need to, getting lunch ready.

It’s a very tai chi pace of movements with everything and generally feeling that while there is quite a bit of exhaustion...you wake up in the morning and you feel like you were breaking concrete for 8 hours and you just got off work.

That's how I feel after I sleep and wake up.

So it's pretty much like going from mildly exhausted to heavily exhausted, to extremely exhausted, to the point where you can't move at all.

There's never a point where I feel like I’m not exhausted and not worn down and degraded.

I have not felt degraded in cognitive capacity, but I have been on a continuum of degradation of energy, not quite to where I'm walking funny and worrying about balance.

That's would be the scariest thing, because I've said many times, and it's no joke, that if I were to dare to move around anywhere when the sun was about to come out, or be out high in the sky...if I were to have a fainting spell or a degradation of motor skills to where I trip and fall and that injury compounded with being exhausted already…compounding with being however disoriented I might be in the moment, let alone actually losing consciousness and blacking out for whatever reason which is always a possibility...

That’s the worst case scenario, but a very feasible scenario is that even the slightest bit of losing balance can result in a domino effect of injuries that lead to losing consciousness and then seconds count when the sun is baking and there's no shade. So with all of these variables it's a matter of sneaking around the sun and sneaking around the peak temperatures and just trying to be hyper aware.

So it's very much a martial arts sort of tai chi, like walking on a log in the lake kind of a thing, being hyper aware of every element of balance and just making every movement extremely slow.

So far so good with the adapting to the night cycle and just getting by.

These are the longest days of my life.

I've never felt time go by slower in my life.

I won't go in detail, but I've been in places where time moves slow and I'll leave it at that. But this is the slowest time ever.

It's a meditation exercise, it's very much a character building exercise.

The days are long in terms of the numbers of hours of sunlight, but they're long in terms of the psychology of wanting to get to the other side of this season alive.

The inescapable fact of time not speeding up. I can't turn a crank and make the clock go faster, and I can't do much to “get in the zone” of an activity.

I can do a little bit of reading, but that becomes laborious.

So mainly it's podcasts and documentaries, and luckily with that online connection and off grid solar, I can just basically lay low and listen and catch up on my archive.

So obviously I get to learn a lot. This is a time of extreme compression of learning. I do feel like my ability to learn is preserved very well.

It's only just the moving around part and the sitting up and doing things.

I can do a couple few hours of work on the computer before midday, given the fans and the wraps. But that starts to feel extremely tortuous to just use the keyboard, to look at the screen.

It’s tough for a workaholic. This is a workaholic treatment camp, because it'll knock you out.

And, of course, more time for introspection, where I will shut everything off, and I will just do that inner work and that introspection and that life review stuff.

So plenty of that going on as well, which you can never catch up on that enough.

It'll always be biting your ankles, unresolved issues, and even going back and burying hatchets in my own mind and forgiving people and forgiving myself and reliving experiences, letting them go, that's all processing that has to happen.

You can't just dump all of that on MDMA or aya, or a therapist, or lover or any god or, anybody...It's important to do that soul searching work just manually, and so it's a good opportunity for that.

And so I think I’ll come out a better person.

I do wanna survive. I do have more reasons to live.

I feel like I'm forced to go through what a lot of the more sort of extreme spiritual retreats would be intending to do, which is to just take you out of the patterns of life that allow you to build crutches that keep you from doing the real shadow work.

But getting closer to the acute extreme event...so despite best efforts and despite having a decent sense of knowing what what to look out for something did, creep up so fast that it was impossible to anticipate or to mitigate, and it was a medical emergency that thankfully resolved.

So after one of the seemingly successful nights of feeling okay, not feeling worse than normal, but having that sense of exhaust, of just chronic exhaustion, and then getting up in the morning and going through what would be a normal routine of light very slow, mildly exhausted, mildly degraded energy level, but not degraded motor skills, and not degraded cognitive skills.

Just going about normal morning activities, and then having the sense of being less hydrated than I'd be happy being normally.

So I drank more water in a shorter period of time than normal.

I know it's ill advised to over-drink, to overdo anything even if you're really hungry, even if you're really thirsty.

I knew better. But there’d been times when I had gotten away with chugging water until it's all over my face, and I don't even care and I'm just panting and then I'm fine, I'm great.

I’d never had any issues with doing that. It was pretty routine for me for me to do that.

For me to just get to a point to be like, I don't care anytime during the day or night. I was not holding myself to a very, very strict cadence of drinking water and being very strict about about limiting the amount per per drinking session to a relatively small amount just to be extra cautious about the potential of any adverse effects from drinking too much at once.

I would do that just during a normal day of work in the city or whatever.

It's not out of character for me to chug half of my water bottle at once and then fill it up and be sipping off of it for a few hours.

Let's say, after exertion, after digging a ditch, I'm gonna pound it, no problem, I'm just back to good, and sure I lost a little bit on my shirt, but, never in my life had I any problems, even after even working in extreme heat and doing very, very exhaustive labor.

I never had a problem with chugging water after losing a bunch of water, sweating out a bunch of water on the job and feeling the need to pound water.

The difference between any other time I had done that before and the situation I'm in now is that now there is a chronic grinding, 24/7 cumulative, unrelenting sweating out. I'm urinating less, obviously.

So the so there's concentrations of toxins, there's leaching of electrolytes. There's all the effects of just mild, chronic, sub-optimal balances of fluids.

To keep that maintained and to not push it by exerting myself, it's already in red. It's already in the danger zone.

I can do the morning routines and get back to hiding out and lay low and just be in maintenance mode. It creeps up though, how much is there a red within the red? How do you perceive that red within the red?

That's the nuance that I would not have known better.

Having made that mistake of being in the mild red and then going into the extreme red, it happened instantaneously, despite everything sort of feeling okay.

Pounding that water, it wasn't that fast, it wasn't that much, but it was just enough under the conditions to cause an acute reaction, which I had never experienced before.

After chugging water, not feeling like I was risking my life by doing so...though admitting that I cannot say that I did not know better. There’s a difference if you’re chugging water if you’re digging a trench in the winter, but it's not okay now because you're experiencing a cumulative depletion.

I have ingested the knowledge that I should have not done that but you don't always do everything right. You're not always remembering all that technical minutia until something bad happens, and then you'll never forget it.

So that's the point I'm at now. I did chug some water, then within seconds of drinking it, I went into a form of shock which there are many forms of shock but luckily it did not, involve convulsions, obstruction of breathing or a disruption of breathing. It did not seem to involve a problem with circulation or the heart.

I just studied an E.M.T. training video series...I would say it was a major acute involuntary autonomic physiological reaction to a condition. An acute onset of a condition. I would diagnose it and how I identify it, I'll get to that in a bit, but to explain what I experienced without knowing what was happening, and without knowing immediately how to categorize it, just living through it, what occurred was an immediate extreme cramping as a response to an electrolyte imbalance.

I've never treated anyone with acute electrolyte imbalance induced cramping of muscles. I've never responded to myself or anyone in that situation.

I've never seen that physiological reaction. I’ve read about cramping, and when I think about it, one of the first things that came to my mind was a flashback from the movie Platoon, where Charlie Sheen is restrained from drinking too much water by the platoon. He’s marching with his other fellow soldiers, they don't want him cramping up.

And obviously they would know, they've got to survive and do a mission and march, it’s life or death.

It was that cinematic moment, that was me, effing new guy, the FNG with the platoon, who doesn't know better than to just be sipping that canteen because a cramp isn't just a mild sort of discomfort a cramp can be literally debilitating and hopefully not more than temporarily, but temporarily paralyzing for whatever limbs or extremities or muscle groups are affected.

So I did not have myself an imprint of what to expect. I couldn’t yet comfort my mind with the narrative of I simply drank too much water. Just like they told him not to do in platoon. I'm gonna suffer. I'm gonna experience pain and cramping but then I'll be fine. It just needs to wear off and sort itself out. I just need to drink more regularly and drink in smaller amounts.

This was so extreme. I did not know what to make of it, and I did not immediately associate it with the drinking of too much water.

I felt like it was so extreme and so out of nowhere and so totalizing…

From my fists to my elbows and up to my shoulders on both sides, cramping down so that my fists were completely immovable. I lost all sensation.

I was numb and paralyzed. Paralyzed is probably the wrong word, there were electrical signals going…it was just stuck in a clamped position, but I cannot feel it.

So fists and arms clenched on both sides, like I'm hanging on a pull up bar but I'm not.

My legs below the knees cramp up, the feet didn't seem to curl backwards, it clenching mainly of the calves.

Then I'm basically stuck in that position, and I can only barely move my torso and my pelvis and my neck and head, my face feels numb, intense and flushed.

The first response in my mind is that okay I'm having some like a tetanus muscle reaction.

I have seen illustrations of the tetanus clenching reaction that is totalizing, and basically the whole body can snap. That was the image that flashed in my mind.

The platoon image came later. The first image was this, the only reference point I have in my consciousness.

It was a gradient to get to that point of tension. So the gradient experience was what I would describe is like if you stand up too fast and you get dizzy, you see stars, you fade to black, you pass out, and you hit the floor.

That's happened a few times in my life. You know, it's called getting up too fast.

If you have low blood pressure from laying down. I'm sure a lot of people have experienced some degree of that. It's often recommended that when you get up, you try to get up slowly. You get up in stages. You do a little breathing, maybe even do a little bit of calisthenics while you're sitting up to get some blood flow and oxygen flow. Then you stand up slowly, and maybe you stand up with a little bit of support.

It obviously affects older people a lot, but I've had that experience, even as a child, literally not being able to hold on to anything shaking, falling dead weight, continuing to shake, and then coming out of it, being glad you didn't fold your knee backwards or cut or scrape something or knock yourself out worse.

It's only happened like a couple of times, but normally, after knowing that was possible, then realizing, okay, if I ever get up too fast and feel that I better brace myself, I better get into position where I can collapse safely, into a safe position.

It's not like being a ninja, doing a ninja roll, but it is important.

Like in jujitsu I was taught ways to fall slapping the arms back so that you diffuse the energy of falling and diffuse it across joints and roll the joints a bit.

So there is an art to losing consciousness and falling as safely as possible with whatever consciousness you have left.

Luckily I was in a seated position and I could basically roll myself into cushions to where I was safe.

I was lucky that it was very early in the morning, the sun was not quite out yet, so I knew had time for it to wear off. I knew I had time to think.

Luckily I was not blacking out, but I had no guarantee in my mind that I wasn't going to lose full consciousness or even go into a coma.

I discover later, all these things could happen for any reason. You just never know. You never know when you might have some genetic disorder inherited that just occurs out of nowhere. That’s a ticking time bomb. That gets you at some point usually later life. It just comes out of nowhere.

I don't know if it's something like that, or something I did or didn't do, or what was going on. I don't know if I got bit or stung. I imagine there is a time window that I would have if I were bit by a snake or stung by a scorpion...to where your window on reality starts to shut, and you start to tunnel and cave in, and your body is going into shock.

My throat wasn't closing in, but I did have that sense of impending doom. Functions shutting down, body caving and curling up, luckily, not shaking, no distortion of perception, really.

I was left able to consciously control my breath, able to think, and just with those devices left to me, with those faculties intact, to just navigate this sensation of being numb in the legs and arms, clamped down more with more strength than I've ever experienced before.

Having to first and foremost, carefully roll into a safer position that I could not fall from.

From that point of being in a semi stabilized position on a cushion, at that point I could start to reverse engineer and use deductive reasoning and say okay I'm able tO breathe so I'm going to breathe powerfully.

Not to hyper ventilate to make it worse, but try to get oxygen to the blood, to the organs.

Then starting to think about the double edged sword of rehydration. That is the, the curse of dehydration is that water on top of dehydration, without electrolytes added to it actually can harm you worse and cause the conditions to accelerate in the worst direction.

That was what I began to to speculate. But still dealing with the idea that this could be a tetanus clamping response or some other weird, bizarre reaction to some bite or sting or something weird.

So my main concern at that point was not the electrolyte situation.

It was what happens if this clamping does not stop? And what happens if I start convulsing and start thrashing around and injuring myself, not being able to feel it or stop it, well, I'm clamping so hard and I can't feel pain from it, so I don't know if I'm breaking bones or causing damage.

There's nothing I can do to pry my fists open and it's not getting better after about 10 minutes. That was frightening. So the first measure after repositioning was to force my fingers open.

I wanna open these fists because I don't want that tension to continue to where it's gonna buckle bones or break bones from muscles contracting too tightly. They're responding to some stimuli that's happening at the nervous system level that's beyond my control and could be a part of some syndrome.

Now I've got to mitigate that somehow by force.

So because I was able to rotate my shoulders enough to push my hand over the ledge of an object, to where I could with a little bit of strength and a little bit of mobility in the rotation of my shoulder...

I could drag the fingers open, and then, of course, they would just, re-assume that clenched position.

I would have to drag and drag and drag over and over…

Luckily, I have a lot of rocks that I place around for different purposes to hold things down in the wind or hold fabric down. So I had rocks. I was able to use this tactic to get my hands opened around two rocks so I would know that at least no matter how hard the muscle cramps are gonna happen, they're not gonna push past that obstacle, there's not gonna be damage from that over extension of that range of movement.

I'm thinking, well, I guess I hope that I don't have convulsions now that I have locked lethal weapons into my hands, basically the earliest lethal weapons.

I've got these stone tools now welded to my clenched fist in both hands.

I hope that the harm reduction of protecting my muscles from breaking my bones in my hands was the right trade-off to put myself at risk now for being able to clobber myself to death, autonomically, through some sort of convulsion that could occur.

On a side note, seizures happen with a storm of activity in the brain. Convulsions happen with random erratic movements of the body. So a lot of people, I think, including myself, might confuse those semantics, it seems like the logic would be a seizure in the brain can lead to convulsions, but they're not necessarily correlated.

A seizure can occur without any physical manifestations of violent movement or otherwise.

So I'm enjoying the fact that, while there may be seizures that I'm not aware of. I'm not experiencing indications of that. And what appears to be happening is some sort of electrical system malfunction of nervous system signal, or electrical signals being sent to clamp those muscles down. I had been aware of that potential, just not to that extreme.

I would not have expected that mild dehydration is gonna cause that extreme of a condition.

It's a constellation of factors involved with dehydration and having sweated out electrolytes.

Good news is I keep breathing. I breathe intentionally to maintain oxygen and blood flow, because I don't wanna have the equivalent of hypothermia damage, where lack of blood flow, if I'm clenching, if lactic acid is building up and clenching muscles so hard...eventually, at some point, I figure that can't be good for the tissues to not be getting relaxed and cycled through lactic acid, purging and oxygenation.

So I'm just trying to breathe, doing a little bit of movement, just to keep circular motions going a little bit, breathing.

Then I had time to just do nothing for the next several minutes and think about the predicament.

This is where it gets philosophical. The only way to not be exposed to this is to tap out, be a city slicker, go get a job, get COVID five times a year without sick leave, or a functioning health care system, health insurance, and be at the mercy of variants of covid...

Though obviously, I'm thinking if I survive this, I have to tap out. I'm crazy. Everyone knew I was crazy. Everyone said I was crazy.

I was cavalier, the bold survivalist pushing myself to extremes.

There are people doing extreme everything out there, they're sponsored, they're famous, and I got none of that. I'm just trying to grow some of my own food and try to avoid the plagues and live in peace and live my own way.

Leave people alone and be left alone.

A a humble extreme survival experience. But I guess this is too foolhardy to try to do this out here alone.

It would be a totally different scenario if this was a small team, small group, where we said, we're gonna do this, but we're gonna have each other's backs. The odds of us all having an acute episode at once are minimal. So we will take turns nursing each other. And that would be a far more I optimal strategy.

They say, no man's an island. Well, you can be an island until you're not, until you're a dead island.

So it's a gamble with my life doing this, but it's a gamble with my life not doing this. I'm actually beyond the point of no return. Bcause of my risk modeling with COVID and I choose to gamble with my life and my survival skills in this circumstance over playing roulette with public health and epidemiology right now, that's my choice.

This was a moment where that choice became as night and day, as clearly defined as ever. There really is a high stakes gamble.

Now, Cody Lundin would laugh at me and say, no, dude, you're effing camping, cause you got all your kit, and he would be right. So I'm doing desert survival camping.

Cody Lundin, who I bow down to and respect more than almost anyone on Earth, you're right, this is desert survival camping.

It is not desert survival in the purest sense of you, your blade and the desert, and that's it.

So I acknowledge that, but it’s something where the stakes are high.

I’m laying there, curled up still clenched up saying to myself I guess this is it.

I may survive this, and I may be horribly damaged.

I don't have any confidence that I'm gonna come out of this experience without partially being paralyzed, or without losing some function, or without having mechanically injured myself in this process.

Or what if I start bleeding out?

I'm sitting there going, I don't know how I'm gonna make it out of this, but this, this has got to be the point where I throw in the towel.

This gotta be the point where I call time out.

I can't risk this happening again if I survive this and I don't leave after this immediately and go...hey, I tried. I know I tried. I can have that acknowledgment of myself that I tried, but I've got to go back to be within range if there's a medical emergency, so someone can respond.

But really all that could ever be is going back within the matrix, going back within all of the city laws, all of the codes and ordinances, and paying to be a part of every system and being subject to all of the backwash of all of the toxins and all of the pollutants and all of the crazy and all of the risk. And all of the corruption and crime and everything I left the city to get away from.

So, no, I came out here to get away from that.

If I die out here, beforen now theoretically, I had to believe that I would be okay with it, now I know.

I wasn't going through some neurotic, stages of grief, remorse, reckoning, bargaining, anger.

No, it was like you signed up for this. If you die out here, you can die peacefully.

I'm not asking anyone any favors to clean up after me if I die out here.

Because it is the job of those authorities and those service providers. It's their job to find people who die of exposure on their homestead in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. That's their job. That's how they find people. That's their job all day, every day.

So it's an interesting thing, to absolve yourself of feeling guilty about being a burden.

It's like, no, that's their job. The state does that. And sometimes they miss a spot. Sometimes they don't even know what happened. Sometimes they don't find you for years.

No one's complaining. There's no foul play. You're not a missing person, whatever.

That's just rural living. That's how rural living works. I'm not used to that.

They're are people who have more family, they go to church. I don't go to church. I don't have family out here. I don't relate to anyone out here. No one is gonna go fishing with me next week and wonder where I am.

I am in a very pristine position to expire.

To be consumed by the wildlife, and hopefully not stink enough for anyone within that range of stink to smell the body. That's a little bit morbid, but it's also a part of what ninjas.

Are you ready for your own death? You cannot be a warrior of any kind if you are not prepared to meet your death, to be psychologically prepared for it.

So in a modern sense, military service men go off onto a deployment. They have to refresh their last will documentation. They're forced by procedure to square that stuff away.

It’s so shameful that in a world of mental health crisis and the taboo of even having any clue about death whatsoever I think people would be a lot more resistant to suicide if they had a healthier attitude and relationship towards death and dying.

You would respect it more. So I respect death and dying to the point where I do not wanna die in a way that I'm a burden to anyone else, emotionally or logistically, or anything else.

If I die on my land of exposure to the elements, of old age, of whatever it is, if it doesn't produce an odor, if I'm not a nuisance to anyone. I would prefer that.

I don't wanna die getting hit by a bus.

I don't wanna die in prison.

I don't wanna die on a battlefield of a war that I don't believe in.

I would like to die peacefully on my own land, gracefully and in a way that is not a nuisance to anyone else and eventually if the authorities do what they are paid to do...they say, Oh, there's an old guy with a beautiful oasis forest garden in the desert. And look, he died smiling, hopefully it wasn't because he had an electrolyte imbalance.

But with all that said, I'm looking up at the sky, and I'm thinking, I'm in a position to where, if this is it, it's pretty graceful.

This is about, as paradisical and idyllic and fantastical of a way to go out as it gets. It couldn't get much better.

It was a good run. I'm glad I didn't die with my whole life ahead of me.

I'm glad I didn't die having suffering years of chronic pain.

I'm not in any pain. I didn't feel pain. It was just bizarre.

But if it was gonna lead to coma and blacking out and I lose consciousness before the sun fully comes, if I’m indefinitely paralyzed, even if I'm only paralyzed for half a day…

Not being able to access water for that that many hours and the sun coming out, I probably will actually die of sun exposure, actual heat stroke death because I can't mitigate it, because I can't move my hands and that's that.

I could barely move my legs, but couldn’t walk. So that's that, that's the philosophy of it.

That is me encountering that extreme.

If that's what people are doing, tempting fate with cliff jumping and skydiving and remote extreme whatever, this and that, and reality TV show, this and that, I’m facing that, if that's the goal to know yourself after that peak...that climax of it's not a theoretical anymore.

If I had not lost the ability to use my hands I could blow a survival emergency whistle or I could make an emergency phone call or some use some kind of beacon.

But now, I guess what it comes down to is that I would have to have some sort of, necklace beacon button that could be activated by pressing it without dexterity of the fingers and I think some people do have that as a service you can pay for. To have this GPS emergency beacon where they're gonna send those helicopters out for you, no matter where you are in the world. So you better mean it, and you better not bump that by accident.

I'm aware of that existing, I'm not ready to upgrade to that at this point.

That's just the way it is. That's just was what it was.

There was an edge case of being like, this is perfect storm, of not being able to call for help, and being in a situation where, if this doesn't wear off and I can't start moving again before the sun comes up, I will die today, and hopefully I will be blacked out when that happens.

So these may be my last thoughts, my last breaths, my last prayers, whatever it really was, just a sense of deep peace that I will be remembered without having had any huge scandal, any major incident, any great harm done to anyone else that could just undermine the legacy of art and creativity and expression that I do hold sacred about what I've done with my life.

In a neo-shamanic sense, about creating, empowering artwork and giving back to the community and doing that with visual arts and musical arts. Actually transforming the landscape by installing gardens and leaving places greener than I found them, and leaving a green footprint of life wherever I travel to, and having had a lot of good love and a lot of true love, and just having had a really good life despite all of the trauma and all the things I could complain and gripe about.

I alchemized the trauma, and I made beautiful healing art out of that.

And all of the tendencies that could be corrupting, all of the potential of selling out, and all of the things that I could be cancelled for…

If you don’t die a hero, you live long enough to become a villain.

There's a certain death wish of that. But I'm gonna keep trying to maintain at least the level of grace and high regard for myself that I had at that moment.

And that means continuing to just try to stay alive, stay out of trouble.

Stay out of drama, continue to reduce the attack surface on my digital life.

Continue to complicate authentication into my private sphere, and just to sustain that grace, because I do feel whole enough knowing I've achieved enough as an artist, as an activist, as a rebel, whatever, to say, I can die proud and I can die any day.

So any day is a good day to die, and it's an even better day to live.

I'm not gonna make any prescriptions for anyone else, but I will say, it is a good feeling.

Imagine if Ebenezer Scrooge died before he could wake up the next day and right his wrongs, and he just died knowing that he messed everything up.

That would have been his greatest fear to die without the chance to correct those mistakes.

I had most of those wake up calls earlier enough in life, enough to where I feel like I course, corrected, and at least I know now I'm in a situation where I'm at very little risk of doing harm to anyone else.

So whatever eggs I broke, making omelets along the way. Hopefully I didn't step on, step on necks to get ahead in the social climbing pageantry, prom night psychology.

The social psychology of trying to be somebody.

I was able to be somebody, to have significance and do it for the most part without stepping on necks, without cutting throats to get ahead. I definitely stepped on toes, but not on necks.

The harm I did along the way, the eggs that I broke, I made amends, no one despises me that I know of, and a lot of people love me, and are now at a safe distance to where, if I died, and they know that I was doing my thing.

He died out there facing the elements, and he was free, and he lived his dream, until it caught up to him.

And so be it, I'm not breaking anyone's heart. I'm not gonna plunge anyone into extreme despair.

And they can have the same little Lester Burnham grin that I've got just about the absurdity of life, the comedy of life, and the hope that we all savor and cherish the moments of true love that we that we're able to earn.

Before I get weepy, I'll move on and get down to the technical, after incident report.

How do I make sure it doesn't happen again? Because after that 10 minutes of reflection, gradually, slowly, sensation and movement...It's almost like having your leg fall asleep, then when once it comes back...you sleep on your arm, you wake up and you lose sensation...then the pins and needles come back, and slowly, one digit at a time, you can move around a little bit.

That's how it came back. I sensed it coming back, and I'm like, okay, that was a close call. That was a wake up call. That was a shocker.

I had to devote myself the time to actually studying what could possibly have been the cause and how do I mitigate it.

So I just filtered down from a study of dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, exhaustion over exertion, exercise, basically funneled down through that top level of electrolyte issue, obviously I did not pro-actively add electrolytes to that water I had just drank.

I would have been able to consume that larger quantity in that shorter period of time, and probably not had that disruption whatsoever. It probably would have had the desired effect that I wanted.

So this is where it gets into that health nut debate against the marketing of electrolyte, re-hydration sports drinks, versus plain water, versus water with a little bit of sea salt in it.

I had to think about for my diet, what had changed. What changed was I stopped eating canned vegetables. I gave myself that first year to wean off of canned vegetables. And of course, those contain a ton of sodium. So I know last year I was over the top sodium year round, no matter what.

This year I ran out of all those cans, and I've been down to just the vegetables I'm growing and that I preserve in vegetable soup brine, which has a high sodium percentage because it is a salt brine.

But I imagine that if I did the actual scientific testing that I would discover that I have a generally lower sodium level than I did last year.

So that is something that was a factor that was unacknowledged that I should have mitigated against as I did last year.

One of my friends who is a Burning Man goer went with his partner and I don't remember what year this was but she had an experience of acute heat illness issues.

So they've got to be strict about electrolytes, they've got medics out there and they know what they're doing.

It's not their first rodeo. A lot of Burners would probably laugh at me.

If you’d had gone to Burning Man all those years, then you would have learned your lesson. You would have known better.

But I was just making assumptions that I was doing okay with my electrolytes.

It works until it doesn't, and therefore you get to that critical point, and then something bad happens.

So what I had even been doing last year, because I was reminded of someone who had that heat illnesses...I had put a tiny bit of salt in the water.

If you're really suffering, then you need to use a formula would be considered a diy electrolyte rehydration formula, that will be a mixture of sugar and Himalayan salt. Or equivalent and pure water. So it's gonna taste like broth, it's gonna taste like salt water, but you're not gonna drink that concentration of salt to water ratio ongoing.

A lot of people will drink coconut water instead of drinking water, they drink beverages that have an electrolyte balance, meaning that minerals that are gonna help to the provide the essential functionality of the electrolyte components.

That was the X Factor. It would became clear that what I had not done right was I had not maintained my own re-hydration electrolyte solution of adding a small amount of salt to my water supply with a gradient that's relative to situations like this. Knowing if I sweat more than usual than I better respond with the diet as well as if I go a day without eating any salty foods, that's a part of it too, because a lot of the sodium comes, in fact almost all of it, for most people, will be coming into the diet, not through supplements, not through a hydration mix on top of water.

So that was the X factor, and now this is what it funnels down to.

Hyponatremia, a low sodium concentration in the blood.

If I would not have been able to medicate myself under that condition that I was in, and I would have continued to dehydrate. The pathophysiology leading to death from exposure to the elements would have been based on unmitigated hyponatremia.

Ultimately, that's the path that I was on. I was headed straight for that fate.

The most blessed factor was that it happened so early in the morning that I was calm and thinking however long this needs to wear off, there’s a time window to wear off.

So basically, the solution is the solution.

I'm now being extra cautious and aware of my dietary sodium intake deficiencies and adding salt into the diet carefully and also maintaining a better more disciplined baseline of staying at a higher level of hydration by sipping more often.

These manuals, what these soldiers have had to do, it doesn't get more extreme than the water purification that the Green Berets do.

That's as extreme as it gets. It's no joke to learn that stuff and to learn the hard way sometimes.

I had to learn that the hard way. And I'm going to hope that I don't get sucked back into that black hole of clamping up.

And if I do, I will hopefully again, make it out the other side.

Hopefully, between now and then, I will have done no more harm to anyone else.

I will have cleaned up more of my earthly mess. And until my final day, I will continue to reduce harm and clean up my mess and just be less of a burden and less of a mess for anyone to have to deal with ever.