Hospital

As a note: this will contain stuff that would, in any other circumstance, be considered TMI; But I feel it necessary to be specific and unabridged. 

If you don't care to read my account of the last 5 days, at least read the last four paragraphs, for your safety.

As you might have figured out from my Facebook link that brought you here, I have finally been discharged from the hospital. I had been afflicted by Rhabdomyolysis, a condition where the muscles break down, releasing myoglobin and enzymes into the bloodstream. The kidneys, acting as they usually do, attempt to filter the blood out but become overwhelmed as the myoglobin reaches toxic levels - which soon leads to renal failure. 

It's not a nice thing. So to start, I'll explain how I got it. One of the ways that you can find yourself with this condition is after extreme workouts and muscle strain. Now I wouldn't call what I did "extreme." Difficult, but not "extreme." Anyway, last Tuesday I decided to start back up with P90X, a 90 day exercise program with a video and everything. I had done pretty well with the program during the school year but stopped right before finals. It was hard to get back into the hang of it but I finally found the motivation to start it back up. I took it easy, at about 30% of my normal capacity of a 15 minute workout.

The next day my muscles were sore. Really sore. I couldn't stand up straight, I couldn't walk normally. But I thought I must have just pulled them and was now facing the consequences of the first day back to working out. I continued through my day and even went to a local restaurant's trivia night that day.

The second day after the workout was even worse. I woke up feeling like I hadn't moved all night; my legs and abdominal areas were so stiff and sore. But I expected it to worsen, the second day after working out always seems to be the worst and Advil and Aleve didn't do anything to help.

When I go to the bathroom at work to pee I happened to notice the color seemed off. Like it seemed darker but not just like "oh I need to drink more!" kind of dark. It just looked like normal tint of yellow except with an added shade of slight brown. Instantly I had concerns of what it could be.

I found a disposable 4oz gladware container at home. My urine was definitely brown. Iced Tea or cola colored.

I load up and check myself into the ER at 6:00 Thursday evening. I waited about 1 minute before they brought me back to a room and 1 urine sample and 3 hours later the doctor came in, incredulous, "You have what's called Rhabdomyolysis..."

One of the dangerous enzymes that's released into your body during Rhabdo is called Creatine Kinase (CK/CPK). The normal levels are around 200 (I don't know the units) - mine were at 46,000 and only after lots of IV fluids, did they slowly come down.

Each of my two doctors (one was a nephrologist - kidney doc) individually noted the severity of this condition stating that if I hadn't come in that day, I would likely not have lasted the night. The nephrologist added in that even if I recover, any damage done to my kidneys will give me increased risk of kidney troubles in my later life. Not cool.

My luck, however, while absent when trying to bring my numbers down, was apparently working solely on keeping my kidneys healthy. My nephrologist kept saying, "I have never seen someone with the high, sustained levels like yours walk away with no kidney damage - but yours are fine."

15 minutes of exercise put me in the hospital for five days, and I'm supposed to stay inside for another week. 15 minutes of exercise could have killed me. I know I seem melodramatic, but its terrifying. This is something I feel needs to be known. I'm not a completely out of shape guy, I'm not an athlete by any means but I don't lead a sedentary lifestyle either. This could happen to anyone. You don't have to spend hours overtraining your body to be at risk and it doesn't have to be P90X. That's why everyone needs to know the symptoms. Doctors propose that Rhabdo is actually more common than originally thought. Dehydration, hot environments, and physical stress are just three risk factors that lend themselves to someone developing Rhabdo. 15 minutes of exercise should not have done this to me. I've done this program and pushed myself before. There must have been a combination of things that caused it to happen but regardless, don't think that it can't happen to you. If you do decide to "get back into shape", take it slowly, give your body some time to understand what your plan is. And stay EXTRA hydrated. But this can happen anytime someone is pushing themselves. Marathon runners have developed this after races, even after months of training.

So you need to be wary of the warning signs: if your muscles seem extra sore, beyond what you expected, this is a sign of something wrong. For me, I couldn't stand up straight, every movement was difficult and I could only walk by moving my calves. I couldn't lift my legs while laying down or standing. It can happen to any muscle group. The biggest sign is your urine, if you discover that you aren't peeing as often or as much as normal; or if your urine has a brown tint to it in the toilet (try peeing into a small container without water in it to get a better idea if you are suspicious), go to the hospital. You could go to an AM/PM clinic but if they discover that you have rhabdo, they'll direct you to the hospital and you'll have to go through triage there, further delaying the fluid input that you need.

Lastly: don't take any of these signs lightly, especially if you are experiencing more than one of them. Rhabdomyolysis can easily kill you without medical treatment and even with it can cause irreparable damage to your kidneys and other organs and even still kill you. So don't waste time. It probably sounds like I'm making a big deal out of this but if I wasn't so health paranoid, would I have thought things seemed bad enough to go to the ER? If you saw your urine was a strange dark color, would you have gone to the ER or would you write it off and think "I'll see in the morning"? Because the doctors believed that things likely wouldn't have turned out okay for me had I waited. It scares me to think of how tempting it was to save the money of an ER visit and to just stay in bed with water.

So do yourself a favor, if you intend to do any exercise, google Rhabdomyolysis and learn more about its symptoms and causes. Be watchful and don't be afraid to get a urinalysis if you are concerned. It isn't something to mess with - I certainly didn't expect to spend five days in the hospital and another week in bed following it. And I was a lucky one.

Fun Physics Fact Friday 6: Cherenkov Radiation

In nuclear reactors which are in a medium, there exists something called Cherenkov Radiation. This phenomenon is caused by the charged particles that are released by the reactors at high energies. They move so fast that they surpass the phase velocity of light in the medium surrounding the reactors (in this case water). The particles emit electromagnetic radiation in the form of a bluish light. This radiation is what happens when particles break the medium-specific phase velocity of light "barrier".

It was named after Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov for his 1958 Nobel Prize winning research on the subject. A neat example is shown in this video: http://youtu.be/mgNwtepP-6M

Fun Physics Fact Friday 5

When two uncharged plates with negligible mass are very close to each other. The plates are actually attracted to each other due to what is called the Casimir Effect. This is a result from quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field.
Electromagnetic waves are "popping up" all throughout the quantum vacuum but between the plates only very specific waves can exist, those with a wave number that causes the wavelength of the wave to be multiples of 1/2 and only 1/2, no more and no less. Outside of the gap, any wavelength can exist, an infinite number of any wavelength to be precise. But between the plates only a subset of the infinite number of waves can exist.
Granted, yes, there can be an infinite number of waves between the plates as they can be infinitesimally small but the number of possible waves is still less than the possible waves outside. The difference between the two "infinities" creates a "quantum pressure" that pushes the two plates together.
This force is not gravity, and it's not by definition an electromagnetic force as the two plates are electromagnetically neutral. Since its inception over half a century ago, a lot is still unknown about its origins.

Fun Physics Fact Friday 4!

Fun Physics Fact Friday: Quartz watches are driven by an actual quartz crystal. This is thanks to a phenomenon called the Piezoelectric effect: where if mechanical stress is applied to a crystal, a small voltage is created on the surface. Conversely, if a voltage is applied, the crystal will undergo small changes or oscillations that can be measured and interpreted by the circuitry within the watch. The oscillations will remain constant as long as the same voltage is supplied from the battery and so the watch is designed interpret either electronically (for digital) or mechanically (for analog) into seconds that are presented on your watch face.


Crystals are so good at conserving the mechanical energy applied to them that a tuning fork made of pure crystal can ring for more than several minutes. This is because of how the stress that is initially applied is turned into electrical potential (voltage) and then converted back into mechanical energy, resulting in the "ringing" of a crystal tuning fork.

Fun Physics Fact Friday 3

I apologize for being a day late - I had this fact already picked out, I just for some reason thought that today was Friday. I was wrong. So ready or not, here's the next FPFF!

If you were standing at arms length next to someone and each of you had 1% more electrons than protons, the repelling force between you would be enough to lift a weight equal to that of the entire earth!

I read this one from my Feynman Lectures on Physics: Vol 2 that I got with some birthday money. I bought the entire box set and it's really nice. Back to the point: the force that you would see is called the electromagnetic force and more precisely, in this case, a Coulomb force and it is the force that is observed between two charged particles. As you may already understand from magnets, like charges repel and opposite charges attract. In your body you have, on average, 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 7*10²⁷ atoms. Each atom is composed of a specific number of negatively charged electrons, positively charged protons, and neutrally charged electrons. There is such a perfect balance within your body that you have the exact same number of electrons and protons and therefore you don't radiate a field around your body that affects others electromagnetively. But if you each had more electrons than protons, you would each have a total negative charge and repel each other.

Fun Physics Fact Friday 2!

Sorry, I forgot to post this past week's FPFF on friday. I only posted it on my twitter :/. So here it goes!

Fun Physics Fact Friday 2: Out of all of the universe, less than 5% of it is matter that we understand: atoms, particles, etc. The rest is composed of 23% Dark Matter and 72% Dark Energy. That 95% "stuff" is invisible and current experiments are being performed to try and detect Dark Matter in the world around us.

Reignited with Fun Physics Fact Fridays!

Well as at least 50% of the blogs out there, this one began and died out shortly afterward. I'm hoping to change that with a new hobby of mine: Fun Physics Fact Fridays. And yes, I know that today is sunday, but I had originally come up with this particular fact 2 days ago.

This time I worked out, using some classical particle mechanics and math to discover the proportional size of a single electron within an atom. After a little thought and calculations I have come to conclusion that if a Hydrogen atom was blown up to be the size of the Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, the single electron within that atom would be the size of a #2 pencil eraser!

Furthermore, 99.9% of an atom is pure, empty, space without any matter present at all. A frequent question is "then how come atoms don't fall within each other and collapse?" The answer is due to electrodynamics. The electrons that orbit the nucleus in atoms orbit so quickly that there appears to be just a sphere surrounding the nucleus instead of individual electrons. This is called the electron cloud. Every atom has one. Now electrons have a net negative charge and in electrodynamics, if two charges are similar (e.g. 2 negatives) they will repel away from each other. And this force used to repel atoms is so strong that the atoms and molecules never really touch each other. And on a macro scale, neither do you, since all of the electrons within your hand are repelled from the electrons in what you're "touching", you aren't actually touching the keyboard, the glass of water just before bed, or even the ground.

Well that appears to be all for this weeks physics friday! If you have any questions - I'd be happy to answer them.