Shiver or swelter?
It is a question that hardly anyone who has endured both Snowmageddon and Derecho Damnation wants to confront, if only because the question itself triggers its own torment.
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In these end times, when the power goes out for what feels like forever, which form of suffering is more painful: freezing temperatures or triple-digit heat? In Washington, where caveats and serious deliberation reign supreme, many veterans of prolonged outages can’t summon a clear-cut answer.
“Now that we’re in the heat, maybe I’d say this is worse,” hemmed Ed Grossman, deputy legislative counsel for the House of Representatives. He lives on Salem Way in Bethesda, one of those streets that Pepco routinely forgets and that is always among the last to get its power back. “But then again, how can I express this? Everyone’s miserable, and you don’t feel as badly when everyone is suffering with you. In the snowstorms, if a neighbor has one of those four-wheel drives, you feel this sense of unfairness.”
His wife, Rochelle Stanfield, said the multiple days without power during Snowmageddon in 2010 wrought a certain type of hell.
“You were cooped up. You couldn’t go out. You were trapped,” she said, sitting outside on a neighbor’s back porch in the relentless heat, sipping water from a thermos.
Then, Stanfield paused and contemplated. She remembered something about herself. “In severe cold,” she said, “my extremities turn very cold, and it hurts like hell.”
Great, it’s settled. Enduring freezing temperatures is the worst.
“But I’ve also fainted in the heat,” she quickly added. “Both heat and cold. Both are bad. It’s equal-opportunity badness.”
Doctors are clear where they stand on the matter. If they had to withstand a marathon Pepco outage (and it’s almost always a marathon Pepco outage, let’s not pretend otherwise), they’d prefer to endure it during the winter. Not in a heat wave. Because here’s how heat sickness turns into death:
“You start having severe muscle cramps,” explained Michael Kerr, an emergency doctor at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in Olney. “Then, severe abdominal cramps. Nausea and vomiting start. Your muscles break down. Mental confusion. Maybe renal failure. Heat coma. Then, death.”
Freezing to death, this is preferable.
“Dying in the cold is very painless,” said Kerr, an experienced outdoorsman who likes camping in Montana and northern Idaho. “When you are out in the cold, you start getting confused, disoriented. You literally go to sleep.”
Last weekend, when Washington was hit by sweeping power outages, Kerr said, MedStar Health had a 50 percent increase in emergency visits from patients suffering from heat-related illnesses. Another reason he saw people flocking to the ER was that some aspiring heroes sliced their own body parts while using chain saws to cut up fallen trees.
(Which adds another grisly dynamic to the equation: Is chain-saw pain the worst of all? Kerr hedged. It’s a matter of how big the slice. “Chain saws don’t make clean wounds,” he said. “You get pretty chewed up.”)
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