First, give teaspoonfuls of the rehydration solution. The person should hold this in his mouth, beside the cheeks. Some of it will absorb, and the rest will move down his throat. Give a teaspoon every 5 minutes, and do not rush this, until a full cup has been consumed. Stop for 10 minutes if vomiting occurs, then resume.
If the person cannot swallow or is not alert enough to follow directions, infuse about a cup full of warmed rehydration solution (at body temperature) into the person’s vagina and/or rectum. Place the person on their right side, with hips elevated so that the fluids won’t run out; it will eventually, so have something waterproof and extra towels under their hips. Repeat until you notice a change in their demeanor, either coming to consciousness or getting worse. If improving, you can start giving fluid by mouth, a teaspoonful at a time. Keep in mind that a person who is this bad off who can’t get emergency medical care probably won’t survive, so understand that using your limited supplies may not be helpful anyway.
Once the person is beginning to retain the rehydration solution, start adding probiotics. For a very irritated bowel, colostrum would be better than milk products, and water-based kefir would be tolerated better than milk proteins. If you have no other options, use what you have. There’s some new research that using a small amount of “healthy” stool from another person, and putting that high into the sick person’s rectum, may help restore good bacteria – no studies on if this might help in desperate situations, though.
Refeeding should be carried on slowly, backing off for an hour or two if diarrhea resumes or vomiting occurs. Continue the probiotic sources, varying them, several times daily. Chicken soup as noted previously, along with rice or oatmeal water, are the next steps. The soup contains good levels of vital proteins, vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes, which are severely depleted in this type of diarrhea.
Recovery for a severely weakened person may take a month or longer, and he may have relapses. During relapses, go back to the rehydration solution, probiotics, chicken soup and rice/oatmeal water until symptoms improve. Good nursing care can make the difference.
Hypothermia and Frost Bite
Cold injuries are going to be an issue everyone needs to understand and deal with on a near-daily basis during the winter.
Hypothermia occurs when a person’s core body temperature drops below the usual levels. Someone who is stuck outdoors during a cold spell, who sits down to rest, can quickly become too cold to carry on and can become hypothermic. The person may be pale, drowsy, shivering or may have stopped shivering, and in worse cases may feel a paradoxical sense of heat and may try to remove clothing.
The goal with someone who has become intensely cold is two-fold: avoid having them move around or be moved in a jerky or abrupt manner; and rewarming. Too much movement and sudden movements can send a chilled heart into “fibrillation,” which is fluttering instead of regular pumping contractions. In a serious situation out in the field or without cardiac emergency care, this can be fatal. No sudden movements.
Rewarming can be started outdoors and continued once the person is inside. Remove all wet clothing, even outside, and put on DRY wool-based clothes or blankets. Wet clothing robs the body of heat, although wool tends to retain heat even when wet. Put hot water bottles or warm packs in the armpits, belly, and groin. Be careful that these aren’t so hot they will burn the skin. Replace often to keep the warmth up. Lacking heat sources, lay the person on his right side, remove clothing, and have two other people spoon up to him, front and back, skin-to-skin. Cover all three with wool blankets. Warmers may need to be replaced, if they get chilled themselves. Body warmth is one of the best ways to rewarm the hypothermic person.
If the person is conscious, he can sip heated but not hot chicken soup, coffee, or cocoa. Don’t give alcohol beverages. They increase body cooling by opening pores. If shivering stopped, it may return as the person gradually rewarms.
Once the person has become warm enough to be conscious and retain heat, let him sit near a warm stove with feet elevated. It may take a day or two to fully return to feeling normal – allow them to recover before returning to outdoor activities.
Frostbite can occur with or without hypothermia. Frostbite is when a portion of the skin and underlying tissues becomes frozen or near-frozen. The area is generally pale white or even black, cold to the touch, firm, and numb. If it is fingers or toes, they may not be able to move them.
The goal is to rewarm the area and keep it warm. It’s worse to rewarm and refreeze the area, than to let it remain cool for a short time until you can fully rewarm it. Frostbitten fingers and toes will hurt intensely as they are rewarming. As sensation returns, even lukewarm temperatures feel like flames.
Place the frostbitten area into body-temperature or slightly warmer water. Do not rub the area at all. Keep changing the water to maintain a warm level. You may also place the area against bare warm skin on the belly or armpits. If the person can tolerate it, aspirin or acetaminophen or willow bark tea may be given to help relieve pain. The area is sufficiently rewarmed when it is pink, able to move freely, and feels warm to the touch. There may be some mild to moderate swelling afterwards, which is normal but may be uncomfortable.
If the area was blackened, consider this similar to a severe burn. Once it is rewarmed, it will need to be treated as such. Monitor the site for infection. It will hurt.
After a day or two, you may have to carefully remove blackened tissue that has been cold-killed, since it may interfere with healing. Use a scalpel or very sharp pair of scissors. If you have to do this, the blackened area won’t have sensation, but the tissue around it will. Trim as close to healthy, bleeding skin as the person can stand. You can also treat this area with a sugar paste, as discussed earlier. Make sure the person is eating garlic daily, and use a comfrey poultice to help stimulate new tissue growth.
Starvation and Refeeding
During the past Little Ice Ages, starvation was the great killer of populations. Harvests failed, and the food simply ran out. It is hard to even imagine people being that desperate in this age of unprecedented wealth and plentiful foods – rather like trying to imagine a world without the electric grid.
During WWII, physician Ancel Keys realized that when the war was over, there would be many in Europe who were malnourished and literally starving. His research, involving wartime conscientious objectors who were starved until they lost 25% of their weight, is considered one of the most comprehensive studies of starvation and refeeding. More current research has been focused on psychiatric patients with eating disorders, who are treated in hospital settings.
What this gathering of information tells us, is that the process of starvation not only affects a person’s weight, it affects his ability to think reasonably and act appropriately for his own wellbeing. In other words, you simply cannot give a starving person all the food he wants – he will quickly eat enough to overwhelm his weakened organs, and die. His physiology must be slowly reintroduced to food.
The most current studies state that a person who has had negligible food for two weeks, should start with no more than about 500 calories per day for several days, increasing a few hundred calories per day over the next week or two.
Ideally, the refeeding would be done with strong clinical observation, such as metabolic and bloodwork studies. Lacking that, the key points are:
Monitor heart rhythm; it can become irregular and that can be fatal. Go slow.
Probiotics: yogurt, kefir, juice from sauerkraut by the spoonful. This stimulates and protects the bowels.
Plenty of fluids. Soup is a good choice for refeeding. Sips of rehydration solution for the potassium and salts.
Include vitamins B complex 3 times daily, thiamine 200-300 mg daily, and a multivitamin and mineral supplement. Good sources for the B and thiamine are cooked green leafy vegetables, such as spinach and kale, and also liver. Soup is a good way to get these nutrients into the digestive tract.
Additional supplements of potas
sium, phosphate, and magnesium are important, as well. Potatoes and meat have the first two; green leafy vegetables contain magnesium.
Outside of a clinical setting, then, a rich broth made from meat, bones, and plentiful vegetables of all kinds can be given twice daily, with additional unsweetened fluids such as herbal teas, as desired. Increase that each day that the person is able to tolerate, adding solids foods such as crackers or soft fruit, so that within two to three weeks he is eating as are others in your group. Continue the probiotics, and watch for either constipation or diarrhea. The person will be very tired and may take several weeks to months to recover sufficiently to participate fully in daily routines. Encourage walking, covering more distance as strength returns.
Concussion
Injuries are common in rural settings, and falls lead the list. Falls can lead to concussion. Concussion is, basically, a hard bump on the noggin (BOTN) accompanied by aftereffects in order of severity: a swelling and tenderness at the site, headache, vomiting, blurred vision, memory loss, personality changes, mental and/or emotional or psychological disorders.
Effectively, when concussed, the person’s brain is bounced inside their skull, causing it to become “bruised.” Brain cells die, and the tissues swell, which causes other issues over time. The goal of treating all BOTNs is to minimize brain cell loss and swelling, and then let the body do what it does to repair the damage.
The majority of BOTNs are mild, with little to no aftereffects beyond a sore spot and little headache – treatable with a cool comfrey poultice and bit of willow bark tea.
Mild to moderate concussions, on the other hand, require more aggressive treatment plans. In a situation like the Cold Times where outside medical care is likely to be unavailable, it can become more challenging.
First, anyone who bangs their head hard enough to have a bad headache and vomiting, should immediately begin fasting, or a strict keto diet.
Fasting is the act of eating nothing, but continuing to drink water or other liquids (coffee and tea, unsweetened, are permitted). A strict fast will induce the body to begin utilizing one’s own fat, which triggers ketone metabolism – the beneficial form of ketosis. Hunger is transitory and easily resolved by drinking more water, and usually isn’t noticed much after the 3rd day of a standard fast.
A strict keto diet is eating to stimulate ketone production. In effect, it is a diet focused primarily on beneficial fats including animal fats and oils including olive and coconut. For short term purposes in treating concussion, a keto diet might consist of green vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, mustard, turnip tops, etc) cooked in bacon grease along with bacon. Coffee or tea are permitted, served hot, with a teaspoon of butter and coconut oil in it. All green vegetables are acceptable, and fatty meats are ideal -- and eat all the fat. Avoid fruits, starchy foods (bread, pasta, potatoes, corn, etc), although a half cup daily of blueberries, blackberries, or raspberries can be eaten for variety. One writer called the keto diet “Atkins on steroids”, a reference to the low-carbohydrate, moderate protein diet promoted for weight loss. Hunger is almost absent, but for the first 3 to 5 days, there may be intense cravings for sweets, bread, or other carbohydrates.
The rationale for this is a series of new research that has shown that ketosis induced by fasting or a keto diet confers “neuroprotection” by reduced oxidative stress where the bump occurred. This actually increases action on the cellular level within minute cell elements called mitochondria, and helps protect mental function. It’s accomplished by increasing beneficial ketones within the body, which occurs within 24 hours of the start of the fast.
For Zen-slap treatment, the person could initiate ketosis by immediately starting a 24-hour fast on water, coffee, and unsweetened tea alone. The next day, begin a strict keto diet for at least a week – longer if symptoms persist – with bed rest or reduced activity. Use a cool comfrey poultice to the head, and may sip willow bark tea. The keto diet also promotes weight loss while preserving muscle tissue, so don’t be surprised to see the pounds come off. There may be a “fruity” or “acetone” odor to the person’s breath at the start. This will disappear within a week or two. Remember to drink lots of water.
The use of fasting and ketosis to control concussion symptoms appears to be very successful in the young, and only mildly helpful in older adults. Adults will do better if they fast, then eat a keto diet for 5 days, fast for two, then keto for 5 days – repeating that as needed over weeks to months. However, everyone benefits to some degree, so this can be the “go to” plan for all BOTNs.
11 safety and security
There are multiple types of risks to safety and security that any group faces, day-t0-day type challenges and long-term ones. Some people who newly discover the preparedness concept focus on acquiring and storing firearms, making preparedness an excuse for their gun-buying hobby. We will briefly discuss firearms in this chapter, but there is a vast sea between owning lots of guns and promoting safety in your group.
For example, do you know the primary cause of premature death among so-called primitive people now living on earth? Is it tribal warfare? Infection? Food poisoning? Childbirth? Being killed by predatory animals? Wildfire? Epidemic disease?
No, it’s falls from trees. Of all the possible things that could happen in a wild setting, simple accidents are the greatest danger to health. The same is true in our culture – not falls from trees so much, but accidents cause more deaths than any other single reason. Right now, motor vehicle accidents alone kill 40,000 men, women, and children in the US each year, and maim another 200,000 innocent victims. Statistically, getting into a car carries a greater risk of death or injury than does being blown up by terrorists, catching Ebola, going down in a commuter jet crash, or being caught in an earthquake and tsunami. Yet, somehow we fear all those exotic causes of death, while blithely hopping into our killing machines without a second thought.
In the same way, when we think about the possible risks to safety and security in the Cold Times ahead, we may imagine running gun battles or perilous escapes from marauders as our major risks. Now, these kinds of things may happen – just as terrorist bombs, jet crashes, epidemics, and earthquake tsunamis claim lives every year. Even so, the greater risks to your group are likely to be the mundane ones – falls from ladders, accidental cuts and subsequent infections, a trash fire that gets out of control.
Fire Safety a Priority
Uncontrolled fire is a risk everyone faces in modern society. It’s the main reason people buy home insurance, in case the place goes up in flames. Fire is a tool we use in cooking, and is a tool we will most likely depend upon for warming once we are into the Zen-slap phase. For some of us, fire of one sort or other will be our primary light source, too.
Fire within the home is a potential problem, but fire that comes from somewhere outside is also a risk. There is no woodland, prairie, or community that doesn’t face some potential fire problems – either a campfire that gets out of control on a windy day, or from a neighbor whose lit candle burns down and sets their house and the rest of the neighborhood ablaze. Fire risks appear to be increasing in areas that previously were considered low fire risk, as many ranchers in the Midwest and homeowners in California found in 2017. We all face this right now, but most of us don’t pay sufficient attention to the risk.
Another potential fire risk will arise from EMP (electromagnetic pulse) or CME (coronal mass ejection), an important aftereffect that is rarely discussed. There are indications that during grand solar minimums with changes in earth’s magnetic field, CMEs from the sun increase in potential intensity of damage. Effectively, earth’s protective shield is down and even routine CMEs can generate damaging electromagnetic effects. The EMP of concern is one caused by one or several high altitude nuclear explosions – no fallout, but the EMP damages unhardened technological infrastructure.
The EMP/CME risk to the grid and related infrastructure is, of course, a significant concern, and that is what usually captures
our attention in novels like Forstchen’s One Second After. However, both EMP and CME propagate across long chargeable lines, such as power lines. During the Carrington CME event of 1859, telegraph lines burst into flame, burning down telegraph stations and shocking telegraph operators. We live in an environment that is laced and threaded with a super spider web of power lines now. If the intense energy of a CME or EMP propagates down all those lines….well, it will end up somewhere. Every electrical appliance plugged into the grid will be instantly fried. Some of those will burn, too. Imagine something catching fire in, say, every third house in your neighborhood – or several things in every house. No fire department would be able to contain the fires. There would be no way to stop the conflagration that ensued. It would burn until all the fuel was exhausted.
There is no time in history when humanity has faced a risk like this. Never. We simply cannot know what might occur.
But, we know fire. Boy Scouts and campers of old know that anywhere you build a fire, you make absolutely certain that it is out before you move on – dowsing the fire with water, stirring it, and dowsing again. In the same way, fires within the home must be fully controlled within fireplaces with live fire extinguishers beside anything with flames. Right now, standard commercial extinguishers start at about $20 each, some of the cheapest insurance you can find. After Zen-slap, a small bucket of sand will work as well. Tossed onto an errant flame, the sand will shut off oxygen and the fire will die.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 32