A student tragically had to have limbs amputated after eating his roommate’s leftover noodles.
Resulting in a rare ‘freak accident’, the lad had no known allergies, was dosed up on all his childhood vaccinations, wasn’t a big drinker, smoked marijuana daily and went through two packs of ciggies a week.
But less than a day after scranning the food that had been left in the fridge overnight, he fell extremely ill.
Explained in the below (dramatized) video, the student ended up with a whole load of health complications leading to an eventual amputation of all of his limbs, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the report, not long after eating the noodle dish, the patient – identified as ‘JC’ – had a severely high temperature, a pulse of 166 beats per minute, and had to be sedated.
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He was so ill he had to be taken to the intensive care unit of another hospital by a helicopter for further treatment.
The report states: “The patient had been well until 20 hours before this admission, when diffuse abdominal pain and nausea developed after he ate rice, chicken, and lo mein leftovers from a restaurant meal.
“Five hours before this admission, purplish discoloration [sic] of the skin developed, and a friend took the patient to the emergency department of another hospital for evaluation.”
The story is explained in greater depth in that aforementioned YouTube video by ‘Dr Bernard’.
He noted the severe symptoms he was suffering from seemed likely to have been an aggressive bacterial infection. Less than 24 hours since eating, his kidneys had failed, and his blood started to clot.
When blood tests results came through, it was found he had a bacteria in his blood called Neisseria meningitidis – this isn’t meningitis, but meningococcaemia.
His immune system had started responding, as Dr Bernard explained: “It’s kind of like getting a cut on your skin - the bleeding stops eventually because of blood clot, then the area around the cut becomes swollen and warm.
“It is swollen because the blood vessels dilate so that more blood vessels can get to the area and the swelling is partly due to the fact that there is increase fluid and the warmth is the inflammation.
“But, when bacteria is present in the blood, the entire body’s blood vessels dilate, dropping then blood pressure, preventing oxygen from getting into the organs.”
He continued: "Little clots [start to] form everywhere, as they get lodged into small blood vessels blocking blood flow. As his hands and feet become cold, they are starved of oxygen.”
The problem with all of this - well another serious problem - is that the tissue that is starved of blood starts to turn necrotic. The whole effect is called Purpura fulminans.
While he did stabilise, the tissue on his fingers developed gangrene, as did his legs down to his feet. He had to have parts of all 10 fingers amputated, as well as a bilateral below-knee amputations.
The bacteria that got into his food is known to spread through saliva.
It turns out his roommate had vomited after eating some of the meal the night before, unknown to JC.
Then, they discovered while he’d received his first meningococcal vaccine before middle school, he never had the booster shot recommended four years later when he was 16. Evidence suggests the food wasn’t good, which Dr Bernard describes as ‘a freak accident’.
However, ‘we’ll never know’ what caused the food to have that bacterium in it.
Jess Battison