The Salt Vampire

The Salt

Here’s a recipe for a refreshing summer cocktail:

• 1 part soy sauce
• 1 part apple cider vinegar
• 3 parts water

Instructions: Mix everything in a glass. Drink.

Mmmm, right? Why don’t you go into the kitchen and make yourself a glass right now? I’ll wait.

Okay, so maybe it’s not going to be the Instagram cocktail hit of the summer.

I drink one of these concoctions every night, but it certainly isn’t for the look or the taste. No, the reason I drink watered-down soy sauce is…for my health. That’s right. I also keep a jar of Marmite next to my medicine bottles, because I categorize this yeasty spread as medicine.

I don’t suppose family practice doctors are going to start recommending spoonfuls of Marmite for all their patients, unless high blood pressure is suddenly declared to be a good thing. But hey, I won’t begrudge you your jujube extracts, and raspberry ketone chewables, if you don’t judge my disgusting quantities of salt.

For reasons that have mystified all doctors to date, I am extremely sensitive to lack of salt. When I break into a sweat, the sensation is followed shortly after by an electric surge down my legs. Drinking a saltwater solution helps with the crazy twitches I get after drinking caffeine. (Plain water doesn’t have the same effect.)

It isn’t a natural connection. I first made the conceptual leap on a terrible night when I slept over at my then-boyfriend’s house. The awful cramps kept attacking my legs, and I kept jumping out of bed to escape them. The confusing part was, I hadn’t done anything that bad for my nerve. I had drunk more water than I had the stomach for, and had spent as much time as possible on my feet. But still, these cramps kept assaulting me.

It was clear that I wasn’t going to sleep. My boyfriend insisted on staying up with me, and suggested, as a possible remedy, that I eat some pickles. He suggested a lot of potential remedies, which I mostly ignored, but I agreed to the pickles because I adore pickles. Strangely, the cramps lost some of their oomph afterwards, and I finally fell asleep. (If anyone asks, the lesson here is that pickles are magic, and not that I should listen to my now-husband’s advice.)

Since then, I have run countless experiments on myself where I 1) drink nothing, 2) drink water, and then 3) eat salt and drink water. In the summer (and in cooler temperatures when I happen to sweat a lot) #3 is the clear winner.

The Vampire

There was a time, fifteen years ago now, that I naively decided to leave the plains of North Dakota and head south for the plains of Texas. I got a couple of fans as graduation presents, with notes that said they were, “in case you don’t have air conditioning.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

There was always air conditioning, because Texans aren’t that stupid. Every time it rained, the entire campus would flood until we had to push ourselves down the streets in gondolas, but every building I walked into would have an AC system set to “freezer.”

I appreciated this, because I, as a North Dakotan, did not know that Earth could reach the temperatures sustained by the Brazos Valley in summer. I was not aware that human life could proliferate in a place where it regularly remained over 100°F (38°C) through October.

I started buying clothes based solely on the amount of sweat they could absorb. I memorized the shade patterns on campus and scurried from building to building like a vampire afraid of sunburn. I went to two football games, and then decided I had better things to do on weekends than melt.

As soon as I got my diploma, I headed back to where people wore coats a good three-quarters of the year.

I should feel lucky that, for once, my body took my own preferences into account when it decided to go rogue on me.

My current sciatica symptoms fall into a predictable, seasonal pattern. In the spring, things will start getting worse, and by August, I’ll be panicking. By the end of September, things even out, and by winter, I’ll wonder why I overreacted.

It took me a couple of years before I realized this pattern was not just coincidence.

The first conclusive proof I had came in January 2019, when I flew to Minnesota in the dead of winter. I expected to spend my first few nights short on sleep, and yet, I slept. Quite well. Temperatures during that trip barely poked their heads above 0°F (-18°C), and my symptoms remained much better than I expected, given my typical nerve behavior.

I have since found that many individuals with disk bulges find that cold exacerbates their symptoms. I can’t explain that either, but I guess I’m a maverick.

While cold is still my preferred environment, I realized last year that summer offers its own curious form of protection. When the temperature hit 75°F (24°C), my legs blew up like balloons, thanks to a strike by my veins. While this edema caused my legs to hurt in a different way, my sciatica, strangely enough, seemed to settle down. The swelling seemed to be cushioning some unnamed thing.

Open Questions

So…why does salt help me?

If I could confidently answer that question, I’d make a million dollars and write a textbook. But I’m as mystified as anyone. I’ve tried to look into it, but I can’t find a single compelling reason why salt intake would have any effect at all.

While I’m at it, why does salt affect me so quickly? There have been many times when I’ve lain in bed, unable to sleep, and then went to the kitchen to drink the brine from a jar of olives. By the time I get back to bed, I can already feel the change.

I am astounded that my body can absorb salt that quickly, and I certainly don’t know what my body is doing with it.

There is one thing I know for sure, though: This quirk of mine is an excellent excuse for eating the whole jar of pickles.