Jude’s departure certainly ruffled the Survivor feathers this week. And certainly made for some riveting viewing. I caught up with her on Sunday night.
Jude has been, oddly, presented to most of us purely as a hostage negotiator, rather than the somewhat senior police commander she is. Hostage negotiator is all very well, but what do you do between hostages? Well, apart from her regular job, she is also a suicide negotiator. Formerly a teacher, before she joined the police, studied some psychology, and took training with the police negotiations squad, which included some training from an FBI instructor.
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We chatted about her mystery affliction, which led her to withdraw from the game. She admitted that she didn’t understand it herself and that it was the first time something like that happened to her. She didn't ask to see a doctor, though this facility is available to contestants who are worried about their health, though she did see one, before Tribal Council, when he came to see Mzi and Sanele about their shoulder injuries.
Apparently he confirmed that her blood pressure was rather low, but as he recommended no treatment, he must have thought this was within the normal range of variation, and not serious.
What ailed her?
What she describes sounds like a degree of postural hypotension, when your blood pressure drops when you stand up rapidly - she felt faint and saw black spots before her eyes. She'd passed the careful physical and psychological assessments before being picked as a contestant; and she had previously been told that she had a rather low blood pressure, and that this was fine, and that she had little risk of a heart attack.
This makes sense - she is an athlete, and athletes do indeed often have a slower pulse and a lower blood pressure than the rest of us, and we envy them for it - it's a healthy state of affairs, and nothing to be alarmed about. It had never before been considered a potential problem. After she left tribal council, she was fed a large medium-rare steak, but only managed about half of it. She says it took her quite a while to get to feeling better again.
When she got home, a doctor told her she had an easy solution available to her - to drink some sea-water, so as to get some salt. This suggests that the doctor she saw may have agreed with my initial impression, that much of her problem may have been, like Don's earlier in the game, due to relative dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.
More about hypotension
So, what can we say about low blood pressure/hypotension? We can leave aside various serious causes for it, which do not apply here. What we saw seems to be related to syncope (fainting) and postural or orthostatic hypotension, in which the blood pressure is unduly low when we stand up. If we feel faint, perhaps related to electrolyte imbalance, and/or anxiety, and tend to hyperventilate, by lowering blood carbon dioxide levels, this tends to reduce the extent of blood circulation to the brain, and we'd feel faint and weak.
Low blood sugar also alters our brain metabolism, with potentially similar effects. Severe sweating leading to dehydration leads to orthostatic hypotension, until there is adequate replacement of fluid and electrolytes (such as salt). Exercise can make the symptoms worse. There also seemed to be an emotional component to the situation, which was not explored.
But, back to the game. Jude says that they were all agreed to vote Nico off, as he has become increasingly unpopular with the rest of his tribe, and apparently with good reason. They found him to be an embarrassment and a lousy sport - in all challenges he had been challenging the judges and implying that the other side was cheating. They saw no basis for this repeated behaviour, and even feared that they might be disqualified from some contests due to his unpleasant way of responding. "Are there enough judges watching Rana?" he would ask.
Jude on the other contestants
She commented that Brigitte claimed some physio knowledge, and the "massage" I found ridiculous, was one in which Brigitte said she was "pressing all the right muscles". Hmmm. Jude would rather have voted for Brigitte than Sam, but says that after the fight with Mzi, they all decided to vote against Sam. She doesn't think she misread Sam, and her comment wasn't meant to suggest that he was usually insincere, but that when he offered, in return for her support to protect him and Brigitte, that they wouldn't vote against her, she felt that that offer was insincere and not to be trusted.
Mzi has been like a brother to her, and she comments that he could say anything to her and she would have believed him, even though everyone else lied. She implies that with her training she could identify most of these lies, but that she couldn't tell them what she did for a living - they only knew that she was a police officer.” I don't see why she'd have been forbidden to disclose such information, so maybe this was a strategic decision, and perhaps her own lie by omission? She says that after Sam left, "Brigitte became human again, and we could all talk again".
Looking ahead, she sees numerous strong candidates. "Vanessa isn't annoying anyone" (on the island, that is; her snootiness doesn't impress me) and could go far. Mzi has what it takes to go far, too. Nico, she thinks, speaks too quickly and without thinking. And what has she really learned from her time on the island? She commented on how little you actually need to survive. When you think how we go on holiday, and over-pack with so much stuff we never need.
I found Jude a pleasant, frank, and rather classy lady, more impressive than she had shown herself to be within the show. I note that when she left the tribal council, the group stood up and applauded her. I don't think many others will receive that sort of send-off!
(Professor Michael Simpson, aka CyberShrink, September 2006)
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