Outside...

This morning, as I was eating my usual breakfast of sodium-free, sugar-free Shredded Wheat 'n Bran with unsweetened soy milk, my mother-in-law commented that I seem to have gotten a bit of a tan on my arms; I suppose I have, but I am still rather pasty. She then reminisced that when she first met me -- nearly twenty years ago -- I had one of the darkest tans she had ever seen. I have never sunbathed; I just used to spend a lot of time outside: back then just running around, more recently gardening, working in the backyard, bicycling, whatever. That is until the onset of HKPP. Now just a bit of sun shows on me, not that I have been getting much as of late.

For the past two weeks my wife, my daughter, and I have been in Kentucky visiting my wife's family, and my time outside has been even more limited than usual. It has been in the 90s almost every day, with heat indexes I can only imagine, and nowadays the simple act of sweating is somewhat dangerous. You may wonder why...

Well, sweat contains electrolytes, and one of those electrolytes is potassium. For those that don't know much about HKPP, the hypokalemic part of Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis means "low potassium." And with my particular flavor of HKPP my potassium doesn't even have to go very low; the low end of normal is nearly catastrophic for me. Hence you can see the problem with sweat. I don't even have to work up a vigorous sweat, just the ordinary wicking of perspiration off of my skin in order to maintain an appropriate body temperature in this weather is enough to have an effect. The steady loss of potassium in my sweat leaves me playing potassium catch-up all day long, a game that has a definite toll on my body -- sometimes immediate, sometimes a little ways down the road. Even with the generous use of oral potassium prolonged sweating leads to a yo-yo effect which leaves me more sensitive to any of my other triggers and, at the least, entirely drained by the end of the day.

This is the sort of thing I worry about now. Whereas I used to check the weather in order to determine what I should wear, or if I should bring an umbrella; now I check to see if I should even go outside.

The outside world is a dangerous place.