[Low-Tech] [High-Tech] Portable cooling: higher-TL replacement of water jugs?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

... it reversed my slowly burgeoning heat tolerance. It made so much as going more than two feet away so much harder and stressful than it had been before.

Actual heat-stroke nukes your heat tolerance completely. It's a known lasting effect. IE, if you'd had head-stroke, you would have already lost that heat tolerance, and would have had been unable to build it up, unlike how you were able to without that damage.

There are many forms of injury where they may damage your strength but exercising brings your strength back, and part of healing involves exercise almost immediately after the acute injury phase is over.

But the initial obvious "injury" of heat stroke is half of the actual injury; once the medical crisis is over and the doctors have successfully not-dead-ed you, you're still injured and you still have to recover the acute damage to tolerance before you can do "heat physio". Otherwise, you can end up right back in hospital as a result of very mild thermal stresses.

Or to put it another way, she was still sick enough that doctors might have wanted to keep her in the hospital, but it was a 5-6 week recovery time that could just as easily be handled in the community with some relatively cheap equipment and basic support from friends and family. That, and most people go stir crazy in hospital which doesn't help recovery.

If there isn't GURPS rules for it already, I'd handle it as Temperature Intolerance as a "crippling injury" and note that good environmental conditions and decent hydration can totally substitute for physician care.