" I just know that hass always helped everyone I have ever known under those circumstances."
The concern is to not bring the electrolytes up to normal too quickly in a chronic condition, or what might be a critical level. It doesn't appear that correction rate is too impotant in acute, < 24 hr duration cases. Only that correction, or overcorrection be avoided. Maybe Polybius can comment.
Thanks, spunkets. I'm not medical enough to know all the technical details, just enough to know that he was bordering on potentially severe trouble.
A serum sodium of 140 mEq/L is normal and a serum sodium of less than 120 mEq/L becomes symptomatic in acute cases.
In chronic hyponatremia, compensatory mechanisms come into play and rapidly reversing of the sodium level back to normal leaves those compensatory mechanisms unopposed and that causes damage itself. Rapid correction can cause demyelenation. (The myelin sheath insulating the electrical function of nerve axons is damaged or destroyed.)
So, in chronic cases, the correction is made slowly at a rate of 0.5 mEq/L/hour.
In an acute case, the compensatory mechanisms have not kicked in and the goal is to raise the serum sodium 4-6 mEq/L over the first 1-2 hours.
In this particular case, we need to consider that, as I noted before, two healthy kidneys going full steam ahead can only clear 0.24 gallons of free water per hour. So, if this woman drank the two gallons over a one hour period, she had 7 quarts of free water diluting her electrolyte stores.
That is one royal screwing of the electrolyte pooch so, in such a case, the potato chips should be used only during the ambulance run at full speed to the nearest Intensive Care Unit