After a health scare and visit to the emergency room, Mayor Alyia Gaskins shared some advice for residents: “take care of yourself.”
Gaskins ended up in the emergency room due to severe dehydration during Sails on the Potomac‘s opening ceremony on Friday (June 12). City leaders were giving remarks to kick off the weekend-long festival.
In a video shared on social media, Gaskins explained she had a hectic Friday morning — her dog got sick, she was managing her kids and fielding calls ahead of Saturday’s City Council public hearing. As she rushed to get to Sails on the Potomac, she forgot to drink water.
At the event, she started to get hot and assumed it was due to the weather. But as she arrived at the stage with her son, she felt worse and ran to Misha’s Coffee to throw up in the bathroom. Staff gave her water and electrolyte packets, and she went back to the stage, determined to push through.
Even after Gaskins got through her speech, other officials noticed something was wrong and asked if she was ok.
“But in my mind, of course, I will be, if I just have to push through it,” Gaskins said. “I’m literally sitting there, staring into the crowd, praying to God, like, ‘just let it be okay.'”
When the ceremony was over, Gaskins rushed off the stage and was sick for the next 40 minutes while receiving aid from the Alexandria Police Department, Alexandria Fire Department and emergency management staff. But she ultimately listened to first responders’ guidance and took an ambulance to the emergency room.
Gaskins was so dehydrated that she spent the next six hours at the hospital hooked up to an IV to restore fluids.
“The crazy thing is, what was going through my mind were the emails that I needed to answer, or the things that I would miss for the rest of the afternoon,” Gaskins said. “I was also thinking about how I needed to get to my dog. I could not turn my mind off.”
Gaskins reported later that day that her dog had died.
A visit from a paramedic at the hospital gave the mayor a new perspective.
“As I was laying in that hospital bed, one of our paramedics came back, because I’d been there so long, and he grabbed my hand, and he said to me, ‘You only get one life, and that life is already too short,'” Gaskins said. “‘You need to rest, you need to drink water, and you need to take care of yourself, because we need you, your kids need you, and you need you.'”
