Indiana mom of two dies from drinking too much water

news

To Isabel Keane

Aug 3, 2023 | 9:18am

An Indiana mother of two who told her family she felt like she couldn’t drink enough water to feel full has died after collapsing from water poisoning. This is a rare result of drinking too much water too quickly.

Ashley Summers, 35, was out on Lake Freeman with her husband and two young daughters over the Fourth of July weekend when she began to feel severely dehydrated.

“Somebody said she drank four bottles of water in 20 minutes,” says her brother Devon Miller. told WRTV. “So the average water bottle is 16 ounces, so she drank 64 ounces in 20 minutes. That’s half a gallon. That’s how much she should drink in a day.”

On the last day of a family trip, Mom started feeling like she wasn’t drinking enough water.

Summers’ family said he felt dizzy and had persistent headaches.

“I got a call from my sister Holly and she was in really bad shape. She was like, ‘Ashley’s in the hospital.’ I don’t know what I can do to bring it down and it doesn’t look good,” Miller said.

After returning from a trip, Summers passed out in the garage and was taken to IU Health Arnett Hospital.

She never regained consciousness and doctors told her family that she had died of water poisoning.

“It was a shock to all of us. When they first started talking about water toxicity. Did something like this happen?” Miller recalled.

Dr. Blake Froberg, a toxicologist at the hospital, told the media that rare causes of death are more likely to occur during the summer, when people work outdoors, or when they exercise frequently.

“There are certain factors that can put a person at that risk, but what happens overall is having too much water in the body and not enough sodium,” said Floberg, who later told People said it was important to drink things like electrolytes, sodium and potassium.

Symptoms of water intoxication include muscle cramps, pain, nausea, and headaches, as well as an overall feeling of sickness.

Summers was an organ donor and was able to donate heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and parts of long bone tissue, ultimately saving the lives of five others, her family said.