S1E31 - Guy on Heat-related Illness

Episode Notes

The host Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. You can support her and this show on Patreon at patreon.com/margaretkilljoy.

The guest Guy recommended people support the Gray Coast Guildhall on Patreon to support a small town community space: https://www.patreon.com/graycoastguildhall

Transcript

This is an updated transcript, replacing the machine-generated one which was initially posted with the episode.

1:05:45

SPEAKERS Margaret, Guy

Margaret Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the End Times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and I use she or they pronouns. Normally I do this like whole intro thing that I record after the conversation. But this is a special—a special episode that I'm just doing as quickly—as quick turnaround as I can because of what's going on in the Pacific Northwest with unprecedented heat. And I want people to have information as soon as possible. So please forgive audio quality on my end, I'm recording this from the best place I had access to internet, which is right next to one of the busiest intersections in all of the tiny town of Asheville, North Carolina. But anyway, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And normally I put in a jingle here, but I'm not going to. Instead you should just go to Channel Zero Network. I don't even know the website, you just Google it. I mean, come on, who's actually going to type in URL and you can just type things into the search bar. Go check out the Channel Zero Network, there's a ton of shows that might interest you. Okay, so would you like to introduce yourself with your name and your pronouns? And then a bit of your background as relates to heat related illnesses?

Guy Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on. My name is Guy, I use he and him pronouns. I live up in the Pacific Northwest on the Olympic Peninsula. And my background related to this, I have been a wilderness educator and backpacking guide for many years, especially working down in the Grand Canyon for several years. So a lot of exposure to heat there. And I also instruct wilderness medicine courses. And so I teach and think about bodies and how bodies adapt to stress, particularly heat stress in this context. Yeah, that's me.

Margaret Hurray. I'm so glad that your skillset is about to become very useful away from the Grand Canyon and in the Olympic Peninsula. The rain forest that I believe is not—is it—is it normal for you all to have 109 degree weather? Or is that abnormal?

Guy That is definitely abnormal. Yeah. We sometimes we’ll cross 100 or triple digits over 100 for one or two days in the summer, usually in late July or August. I cannot remember a time when we hit 108 degrees, and certainly not in late June. It is pretty hot.

Margaret Yeah, I've—I'm from the Mid Atlantic and now I live in the south on the east coast. And I've, the only time I've been in—I mean, I've been in triple digits. I don't think it ever got hotter than 103/104 the whole time I was growing up. And only time I've been in 110 degree weather was in Death Valley. So I'm worried about you all. So that's why I'm—I don't, yeah, we're going to talk at a later point with someone that you co teach with about more wilderness first aid. But it seems like wilderness first aid is suddenly might become urban first aid in a way that we're not—I'm not really used to and maybe you're not really used to. I guess to start with, do you want to talk about, like, what are the dangers of heat?

Guy Yeah, so I'll preface this by saying a couple of things. The first is that human—the human body is actually really adaptable and resilient if it has time to adapt to a changing environment. So people can handle really extreme heat if they have time to acclimatized to it. But if we get these big spikes of heat coming in a place where people aren't used to it, we're jumping from the mid-80s, one week to 108 another week, then that becomes a lot more stressful on body. And then add on to that, right, up here in the Pacific Northwest as a culture, as a society, we're not adapted to experience heat. Most people don't have air conditioning. Most people's houses aren't particularly well insulated because, in general, it's a fairly temperate climate. So there's just not the—either the time to adapt on a physiological level or to adapt our environment to really manage and handle this heat. So that said, a few different things happen when we get too hot. So, our body, right, we we sweat, we produce sweat, and that's the primary way that we cool ourselves off. And evaporation is is actually a very effective cooling mechanism. If we have enough sweat, and particularly if there's a breeze that is able to allow that evaporation to continue to cools us off. As our body gets too hot and we start to lose our ability to thermoregulate, we end up seeing a lot of different side effects. And so we used to think of this really clear progression from what we call heat exhaustion to heat stroke. And now it seems more like there's just a lot of different clusters of symptoms that appear when people get too hot. So things like nausea, vomiting, feeling really tired, feeling a little bit disoriented, feeling irritable, some muscle cramps particularly related to exercise, sweating, excessive sweating, but then also maybe some more like chills or pale skin, clammy feeling, as our body just doesn't tolerate the heat extremes very well. And all the symptoms, all those symptoms are unpleasant but fine. And the real danger is when our internal temperature starts to cross 104 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit. And at that point, our brain actually starts cooking. And so we see our mental process change, we don't think as clearly, our personality changes, and we're actually doing long term damage to our brains, and they won't survive that for very long.

Margaret When you say very long, like what are you talking about there, like five minutes, an hour?

Guy Oh, no, definitely in the in the hours realm. But the longer that persists, the more damage—the more permanent damage can be done to our brain and to our bodies. Depends on the heat extreme. And then once we lose that, once we start losing that ability to thermoregulate altogether, instead of maintaining a temperature that's elevated but not too high, we just kind of start to run away, and we can't cool off at all. And then—and then we need help from from other people, we need a change of environment, we need to be cooled down really, really quickly.

Margaret One of the—I asked social media right before this interview, like what advice people had and also what questions people had. And the thing that you just talked about, about how we used to see it as heat exhaustion versus heatstroke is very different. That is one of the things that most people were bringing up is, like, make sure you know the difference between heat exhaustion and heat stroke with the idea, I guess the prevailing knowledge—what I had known prior to five minutes ago when you said otherwise—would be that heat exhaustion is the like, oh, this fucking sucks and I should probably get somewhere cold real quick. And maybe someone can help me get somewhere—not real cold, but like colder real quick—versus heat stroke is like, you know, call a paramedic, like, g