"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

from where we could send out our sitrep (situation report). It had been a
long day, I was tired, and it was raining heavily.
As I sat down to encrypt the message to be Morsed out, my hand started
to shake. Seconds later my head was spinning. My eyes couldn't focus. I took
a deep breath and told myself to get a grip.
It got worse, and within a minute the shaking was uncontrollable.
I tried to write, but my hand was all over the place. My vision was
getting more and more blurred.
I knew what was happening.
We were doing a lot of physical work in the jungle.
We had heavy loads on, we were under mental pressure, yet the body was
still trying to defend its core temperature. To maintain a constant
temperature, the heat loss must equal heat production. But if the heat
production is more than the heat loss, the temperature's going to rise. When
the core temperature rises, more blood reaches the skin, where the heat is
then released. This works fine as long as the skin temperature is higher
than the air temperature. But in the heat of the jungle the body absorbs
heat, and the body counters that by sweating. This has limits. An adult can
sweat only about a liter per hour. You can't keep it up for more than a few
hours at a time unless you get replacement fluids, and the sweat is
effective only if the outside air is not saturated with moisture. If the
humidity is more than 75 percent, as it is in the jungle, the sweat
evaporation isn't going to work.
We were sweating loads, but the sweat wasn't evaporating. So the body
heat was rising, and we were sweating even more. The way the body tries to
get rid of that is by sending blood to the skin, so therefore the vessels
have to increase in size. The heart rate increases, and sometimes it gets to
a rate where its automotive function loses control and it starts to go all
over the place. Less and less blood flows to the internal organs. It's
shunted away from the brain, so the blood that goes there is going to be hot
anyway. The brain doesn't like hot blood going to it, so it responds with
headaches, dizziness, impaired thinking, and emotional instability. Because
we were sweating so much, we were losing loads of electrolytes, sodium, and
chlorides, and the result was dehydration. We were losing noncirculating
body fluids.
The problem is that just a few sips of I-quid might quench somebody's
thirst, without improvinig his internal water deficit. You might not even
notice your thirst because there is too much else going on, and that was
what was happening to me. I was mooching through the jungle, the patrol
commander, under pressure to perform, trying to make decisions. The last
thing I was thinking about, like a dickhead, was getting the fluids down my
neck.
"When you have a piss," the DS had said, "you look at it. If it's
yellow and smelly, you're starting to dehydrate. If it's clear and you're
pissing every five minutes, that's excellent, because the body always gets
rid of excess water. You can't overload with water because the body will
just get rid of it. So as long as you've got good clear piss, you know that
everything's all right."
I turned around to Raymond and said, "Fucking hell, I'm going down
here."