Who Would have Thought?

Who would have thought that by working out you could give yourself kidney failure! We sure didn't...but you can...and Chris almost did! Last Monday, he went to the gym for the first time in a long time. He worked out with a trainer. The next day when he was complaining about being sore I basically told him to suck it up and stop complaining because he would be fine. (I am such a nice wife, aren't I :)) By the end of Tuesday his arms had swollen up pretty badly and I thought that was unusual but I spoke with the trainer and they mentioned that it can happen. So we continued to let it go but Chris still was saying that he was in a lot of pain and it wasn't going away it seemed to be getting worse. I feel really horrible because I still figured it would just go away. Well Wednesday night he started peeing BROWN! That is definitely NOT normal and then I knew that something was wrong. I told him to drink twice as much water as he usually does and we started looking up stuff online. He didn't want to go to the doctor. By Friday, I told him he had to go. When he went in, the doctor almost hospitalized him immediately. He still had blood in his urine, his liver enzymes were 10x higher than they should be and his CPK test (which checks to see if a certain amount of enzymes are in the blood) came back over 100,000 (it is supposed to be under 300). The doctor said that he had something rare called Rhabdomyolysis. It is when there has been trauma to the muscle and it starts to die. As the muscles die, they release so much "gunk" into the bloodstream that the kidneys can't fight it and shut down. The only treatment is dialysis. Luckily, Chris's kidney function test came back fairly normal so he let Chris go home. He told us that he was the first patient he hadn't hospitalized. He had to go in and get more testing to make sure he was continuing to improve. In the meantime, he has been in a lot of pain, nauseated, extremely fatigued and disoriented. He also couldn't use his arms at all...his muscles just don't work. He is slowly getting better and will hopefully not have any long-term effects. BUT who would have thought that this could happen simply by working out?!