A 35-year-old American woman tragically lost her life while vacationing with her family after drinking two liters of water in a very short time and suffering severe brain inflammation.

Ashley Summers was celebrating the Fourth of July with her family on Lake Freeman in Indiana when she started feeling really dehydrated because of the hot weather. She eventually got a bad headache, and she was drinking a lot of water. She ended up consuming four 16-ounce bottles of water in 20 minutes, and although she didn’t experience any serious symptoms at the time, she later collapsed inside the garage of her home and never regained consciousness. Doctors told her shocked family that Summers had suffered severe brain inflammation after drinking too much water in a very short period of time.

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“Someone said she drank four bottles of water in that 20 minutes,” Devon Miller, Ashley’s grieving brother, told reporters.”… Her bottle of water is like 16 ounces, so that was 64 ounces that she drank in the span of 20 minutes. That’s half a gallon. That’s what you’re supposed to drink in a whole day.”

“It was a shock to all of us when they first started talking about water toxicity, and it was like, ‘This is a thing?'” Miller added.

According to Dr. Blake Froberg of Indiana University Health, water toxicity occurs when someone drinks too much water quickly and they don’t have enough sodium in their body. Symptoms usually include muscle cramps and soreness, nausea, headaches, and a general feeling of being unwell.

 

“Drinking too much water [can] cause the sodium in your body to become diluted. When this happens, your body’s water levels rise, and your cells begin to swell,” the Mayo Clinic explains.

“The warning takeaway that I take from it is … if I’m thirsty and I drink a bottle of water and I still feel like I haven’t got enough, that might be the light bulb for me to go, ‘Ok. You know what? I need to drink a Gatorade,” Ashley’s brother concluded.