CARE YOUR HEALTH

eenager Ashleigh Morris can't go swimming, soak in a hot bath or enjoy a shower after a stressful day's work - she's allergic to water.

Even sweating brings the 19-year-old out in a painful rash.

Ashleigh, from Melbourne, Australia, is allergic to water of any temperature, a condition she's lived with since she was 14.

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She suffers from an extremely rare skin disorder called Aquagenic Urticaria - so unusual that only a handful of cases are documented worldwide.

When Ashleigh gets wet her body explodes in sore, itchy red lumps that take about two hours to ease.

She has to wash. But showering is a painful experience and she can only do it for a minute at a time.

These brief showers are the only contact Ashleigh has with water. The one thing she doesn't miss is the washing up.

"People find it hard to believe, they say things like 'Oh my god, how do you wash.

The rash Ashleigh gets after coming into contact with water is MORE painful than it looks

"That makes me feel dirty, but I consider myself a very clean person," she said.

Most of us take showering for granted but for Ashleigh it's a painful endurance that often reduces her to tears.

"Although my rash is unsightly, and often looks like I'm diseased, the feeling is so much worse than it looks," she said.

"I can't go anywhere for about two hours afterwards because it's so severe.

"There's been many occasions where I've been so itchy, I've made myself bleed from scratching."

Away from water pretty Ashleigh appears like any other healthy teenager.

She leads a busy life studying Journalism and Public Relations at university and working in an office.

But if she gets wet she attracts unwanted attention.

"People stare at me in the street," said Ashleigh who lives with her mum Louise Miller, 42.

"After a shower I stay at home until it goes away, that frees me of the burden of having to explain."

Ashleigh spends a lot of time explaining her condition because few people have heard of it. Most doctors and dermatologists have never seen a case of it. "Many people don't even believe me when I tell them," said Ashleigh, who hardly believed it herself at first.

She developed the condition five years ago after an acute case of tonsillitis. She was prescribed a heavy dose of penicillin that rid her of the tonsillitis but left her with another problem.

"I suddenly started getting a rash after I showered or swam," says Ashleigh who used to swim regularly and spend a lot of time at the beach.

"I tried to ignore it but it got progressively worse so I went to see a dermatologist."

Ashleigh's dermatologist, Professor Rodney Sinclair, told her the penicillin had altered the histamine levels in her body and caused the Aquagenic Urticaria to occur.

There is no cure and no successful treatment for the condition so the gravity of the situation began to dawn on the 14-year-old Ashleigh.

"I was in disbelief for a while, but I soon realised how serious it was.

"I cried for a few hours, then picked myself up, and kept going. I realised it was something I had to live with," she says.

So Ashleigh found ways to avoid water - she stopped doing sports and anything that made her sweat.

She makes sure she stays in air-conditioned places and always has an umbrella in her car. Her family and boyfriend of three years, Adam, 23, are very supportive but her condition makes intimate moments with her Adam a little difficult.

"We have to sleep with a sheet between us at night, and I can't go near him if he's sweaty," said Ashleigh.

Even the experts seem a little vague about Aquagenic Urticaria.

Dermatologists agree there's an association with elevated blood histamine levels, but there are other processes at work since antihistamine drugs often provide no relief at all.

Nina Goad of the British Association of Dermatologists says: "There isn't a wealth of information about Aquagenic Urticaria because it's extremely rare.

"We're not sure how many cases there are in the world and we do not yet fully understand the precise mechanisms that trigger the weals."

Rhett Lamb, 3, is often irritable, but it's not just the routine growing pains of a toddler's life that has affected him. It's the fact that Rhett can't sleep.

"We went to the doctor after he was born, and I kept telling him something was wrong. He didn't sleep. They thought I was being kind of an anxious mom, and we went back and forth," Rhett's mother, Shannon Lamb, said. "Finally, they [were] starting to realize now that he really doesn't sleep at all. But we've had a lot of different diagnoses and nobody really knows."

His sleep deprivation caused made him very irritable.

"That's going to have a great impact on his behavior during the day -- his irritability, his ability to eat -- and I'm sure it also impacted the parents tremendously," said Marie Savard, an ABC News medical consultant.

Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.

After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.

"The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system," Savard said.

In order to relieve the pressure on Rhett's brain stem, doctors performed surgery this week that they hope will allow him to sleep properly for the first time in his life. Surgeons made an incision at the base of Rhett's skull to the top of his neck and removed the bone around the brain stem and spinal cord, which produced more space.

"Doing the decompression, relieving that pressure, should absolutely improve those symptoms," Savard said.

Still, doctors said the Lambs may not see major changes for several months or possibly even a year. But Rhett's parents hope their son will be able to get some rest and be normal.

"There is a 50-50 chance that the sleep will improve," Shannon Lamb said. "Once the sleep improves, we can work on the behavioral stuff. He's very irritable all of the time.

"I would love to see him play and have a good time and be happy," she said.

It's a bitterly cold winter day and students on the University of Minnesota campus are bundled up, hurrying to their next class. Wim Hof, dressed in shorts, sandals and nothing else, appeared from the doorway of a school building.

He's known as 'The Ice Man."

Scientists can't really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.

From the Arctic Circle to Mount Everest

It's an ability he discovered in himself as a young man 20 years ago.

"I had a stroll like this in the park with somebody and I saw the ice and I thought, what would happen if I go in there. I was really attracted to it. I went in, got rid of my clothes. Thirty seconds I was in," Hof said. "Tremendous good feeling when I came out and since then, I repeated it every day." It was the moment that Hof knew that his body was different somehow: He was able to withstand fatally freezing temperatures.

Hof began a lifelong quest to see just how far his abilities would take him. In January of 1999 he traveled 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle to run a half-marathon in his bare feet. Three years later, dressed only in a swimsuit, he dove under the ice at the North Pole and earned a Guinness World Record for the longest amount of time swimming under the ice: 80 meters, almost twice the length of an Olympic-sized pool.

When he didn't experience frostbite or hypothermia, the body's usual reactions to extreme cold, his extraordinary ability started to get the attention of doctors who specialize in extreme medicine.

Dr. Ken Kamler, author of "Surviving the Extremes," has treated dozens of people who tried to climb Mount Everest, and instead nearly died from the frigid temperatures. He couldn't believe it when he got word of a Dutchman making the ascent with no protection other than a pair of shorts.

"People are always looking for new firsts on Everest. It's been climbed so many times now, people climb it without oxygen, they … they climb it with all different kinds of handicaps. But no one has come close to climbing Everest in those kinds of conditions," Dr. Kamler said. "It's … it's almost inconceivable."

Millions of dieters would give their right arm to be afflicted by the illness that is plaguing John Perry.

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Mr Perry, 59, can eat whatever he likes - including unlimited pies, burgers and desserts - and never get fat.

He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat.

Mr Perry regularly eats Chinese takeaways, chips, chocolate and clotted cream, but his weight has remained stable at 11st 12lb.

He told the Sun that he used to be a chubby child, but at age 12 the fat dropped off "almost over night".

Doctors thought he was refusing to eat or had a stomach ulcer, he said.

He initially tried to eat more to gain weight, but it had no effect.

“I didn’t like being slim at first. As a teenager playing football I was so thin I got embarrassed taking my shirt off," he said.

“I used to eat loads of chocolate to try and put on weight but I couldn’t.”

Mr Perry, of Ilford in Essex, endured a decade of tests before the illness was diagnosed. It finally emerged that his body produces six times the normal level of insulin.

Doctors have admitted that the condition would be a "slimmer's dream".

Please take care while u eat on the road side (particularly tasty vada pav & Paani Puri)...

A 10 year old boy, had eaten pineapple about 15 days back, and fell
sick,from the day he had eaten. Later when he had his Health check done...
doctors diagnosed that he had AIDS.

His parents couldn't believe it...Then the entire family under went a
Checkup... none of them suffered from Aids. So the doctors checked again
with the boy if he had eaten out...The boy said "yes". He had pineapple
that evening.Immediately a group from Mallya hospital went to the pineapple
vendor to check.

They found the pineapple seller had a cut on his finger while cutting the
pineapple , his blood had spread into the fruit.

When they had his blood checked...the guy was suffering from AIDS ..... but
he himself was NOT aware.Unfortunately the boy is suffering from it now.

STROKE IDENTIFICATION:
During a party, a friend stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine and just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. (they offered to call ambulance)

They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food - while she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening. Ingrid's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00pm , Ingrid passed away.)
She had suffered a stroke at the party . Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Ingrid would be with us today.



STROKE IDENTIFICATION:
A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE:
Remember the '3' steps, STR . Read and Learn!
Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster.
The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.


Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions :

S -> Ask the individual to SMILE ..
T -> TALK. Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently)
(eg 'It is sunny out today').
R -> Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS .


If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call the ambulance and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.


NOTE : Another 'sign' of a stroke is
1. Ask the person to 'stick' out their tongue.
2. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other that is also an indication of a stroke.

1. Sleeping too late and waking up too late are main cause.
2. Not urinating in the morning.
3. Too much eating.
4. Skipping breakfast.
5. Consuming too much medication.
6. Consuming too much preservatives, additives, food coloring, and artificial sweetener.
7. Consuming unhealthy cooking oil. As much as possible reduce cooking oil use when frying, which includes even the best cooking oils like olive oil. Do not consume fried foods when you are tired, except if the body is very fit.
8. Consuming raw (overly done) foods also add to the burden of liver.
Veggies should be eaten raw or cooked 3-5 parts. Fried veggies should be finished in one sitting, do not store.