6 ms·
Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him
- lwansbrough 1y agoVibe based debugging. Very impressive. I’m surprised wood doesn’t show up more clearly on imaging though.
- SanjayMehta 1y agoHouse, MD had an episode with the same scenario. Also, Sherwood Anderson in real life.
- e40 1y agoIf the show was still on the air, tbhe writers would have definitely ised this.
- scandox 1y agoA former policeman told me about a case he dealt with in the late 1970s. A man had got up in the morning, had breakfast, got in his car and drove off to work. Halfway to work he had coughed a large amount of blood onto the windscreen of his car, collapsed over the wheel and died - crashing the car in the process. He interviewed the man's spouse. They had a cocktail party at home the previous night and had been drinking heavily. At a certain point in the evening her husband had knocked back his drink so energetically that he had swallowed the cocktail pick along with the drink. The people talking to him saw what happened and everybody thought this was extremely funny, including her husband. The pathologist confirmed that the cocktail pick had worked its way through the lining of his oesophagus and had eventually reached his heart.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoYeah don't swallow things which cannot be digested. I have one anecdotal story of a person swallowing dried bay leaf which then got stuck "at the exit".
- n1b0m 1y agoSurely that wouldn’t survive the stomach acids.
- javawizard 1y agoThey do: https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-685/bay-leaf#sideeffects https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-685/bay-lea...
- abrookewood 1y agoWow .. I had no idea. I'd always assumed you were supposed to remove them from cooking because they would taste bad if eaten directly - not that you couldn't actually digest them!
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoYeah a lot of different leaves don't break down well in the digestive track without friction or longer digestion periods (which are adaptations that actual herbivores have). This is also why they (bay leaves or more generally all laurel leaves) are such a massive pain in the ass to compost in most places. The wonders of insoluble fiber and wax coatings on leaves.
- woleium 1y agos/track/tract/g
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agolol yep. idk how I managed to do that one.
- n1b0m 1y agoI stand corrected. Something to watch out for
- ownagefool 1y agoI swallowed a shirt pin as a child. Went to hospital, x-rays, etc. Originally the set me nil by mouth and were set to operate, but the consultant overruled and luckily it passed naturally. (:
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cafard 1y agoA toothpick did in the writer Sherwood Anderson, in his case by piercing part of the digestive track and bringing on peritonitis.
- doctorhandshake 1y agoA good example of one of my favorite diagnostic axioms, Hickam’s dictum: Hickam's dictum is a medical principle that a patient's symptoms could be caused by several diseases. It is a counterargument to misapplying Occam's razor in the medical profession. A common version of Hickam's dictum states: "A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickam%27s_dictum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickam%27s_dictum
- Aldipower 1y ago"They also looked at his medical history, which was relatively short. He was born in Central America, but he had lived in the US for 16 years." Interesting constellation of sentences. So, the most important thing in a medical history seems to be where you've been born. Is Central America or the US better/worse for your health I wonder? That is not going to be clear here.
- kakacik 1y agoCertain groups of people have certain genetic predispositions. Ie when pregnant there is calculation of down syndrome probability, they take your origin into account. We had something like 1:4000 IIRC, my french teacher who comes from Algeria had 1:200 with his wife. Alcohol tolerance is another (native south americans have lower, as do some asian populations). Over time, env effects also creep up in the genome (ie altitude acclimatization for sherpas). But could be also societal, level of healthcare, level and types of vaccines received and so on.
- nervousvarun 1y agoOr...it could be as simple as his being born in Central America and this taking place in the U.S. means they didn't have access to his earlier health records.
- dahcryn 1y agoyour geographical whereabouts are part of your medical history yes, that's important. Far from the most important thing, but definitely important in case of diagnosing weird stuff
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> Is Central America or the US better/worse for your health I wonder? Better in some ways, worse in others. Central America will be better if you're considering asthma and allergies. It will be much worse if you're thinking about parasites.
- leephillips 1y agoSince moving from the northeastern U.S. to Honduras all my chronic allergy and asthma problems have disappeared. I think it’s mainly the absence of oak trees, but I probably benefit from other differences in the flora as well.
- jonathanlydall 1y agoThese days I look somewhat disdainfully upon heavy drinkers, not only do they often disturb others when drinking (being noisy, obtrusive, drunk driving, etc.), but even ignoring long term health effects, I'm in my 40s now and it's definitely a factor too, but for at least a day after even very moderate drinking I know my mental faculties are reduced, so I can only imagine how much theirs are. I very rarely have alcohol these days, it's just not worth the feeling of fatigue and brain fogginess the next day that's pretty much guaranteed for me afterwards, even from just 2 beers. I suspect it's not unique to South Africa, but there is a somewhat pervasive culture here of excessive drinking. Back when I lived in a complex, I would often see people pitch up in the common area at midday with a cooler box full of beer, and basically sit there for the next 6 hours just drinking, what a waste of a day in my view. And most people don't even raise an eyebrow when someone casually mentions in the workplace this is how they spent their weekend. That the police here are both incompetent and readily bribe-able also makes the effects of excessive drinking particularly pronounced, like traffic lights being regularly knocked over.
- ljm 1y agoAs soon as a hangover shifted from an acute headache to a day or more of drowsiness I started to substantially limit the amount I drink. You can't tackle that with paracetamol or caffeine and it's not worth it any more, and that's just from what would consider casual drinking (a few pints at the pub) in the UK. I can't imagine how badly drunk you have to get to swallow something like a toothpick without knowing.
- naldb 1y agoSpending all day drinking and socialising is a waste of a day? As opposed to what, working? Or maybe watching Netflix at home?
- mythrwy 1y agoCommenting on the internet is the best way to spend the day. Obviously.
- jonathanlydall 1y ago
- d--b 1y ago"This one seems ready-made for a television medical drama" Yep! In fact there was an episode of House MD where the patient had ingested a toothpick and had all sort of symptoms like these.
- swader999 1y agoDamn, so all the savant in the article did was remember that House episode.
- d--b 1y agoThere are a lot of episodes though, so that is still quite a feat.
- aitchnyu 1y agoAt least second real life saved by Dr House. A German doc saved a a patient from cobalt poisoning from a hip replacement.
- konart 1y ago>A mild, dull pain had developed in the patient's right lower abdomen and back. Nine days later, a fever and body aches also developed. The next day, he went to urgent care, where clinicians gave him intravenous fluids and an intravenous pain reliever. Seriously? All this and you just get some painkillers?
- Dilettante_ 1y agoSave you the handful of minutes of skimming: He swallowed a toothpick. "Medical mystery" my foot.
- 1a527dd5 1y agoThis is like when you spend 3 day chasing a race condition, and the PR is a one line fix, and someone comments "yes anyone could have spotted that".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mvdtnz 1y agoThe author says "This one seems ready-made for a television medical drama." In fact an almost identical case was featured in House when a Romani teenager swallowed a toothpick. The episode was titled Needle in a Haystack in season 3.
- silexia 1y agoI have now gone over 1,000 days without drinking alcohol. I was not an alcoholic as conventionally defined, I drank less than what my friends or colleagues or others around me did. But occasionally I would drink a few too many and not feel well the next day. I began tracking exactly how many drinks a day I had (I did not drink every day), and it was eye opening. I decided to cut down from there and after a few years of trying I eliminated alcohol entirely from my diet. I highly recommend every person that drinks alcohol track the number of drinks you have on a calendar and rate how you feel the next day.
- pfannkuchen 1y agoI wonder what unknown condition this woman had? And if the condition itself is what caused her to get so close to homicide, or if it was the man’s drunken behavior?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoNow I want ChubbyEmu to do a video on this and perhaps one on a case of ingestion of a grill brush brass bristle. And obligatory plug of @SmarterEveryDay's chain mail brush.