Student lost all his limbs after eating his roommate’s leftover food
Topics: Health, World News, Food and Drink
Stefania Sarrubba
Featured Image Credit: Alexander Spatari/eAlisa/Getty Images
Topics: Health, World News, Food and Drink
A student had to have his limbs amputated after eating his friend's leftover food.
This may sound like an urban legend, or a cautionary tale warning you against eating leftovers, but it's actually what happened to a 19-year-old student identified only as JC after he decided to eat his pal's chicken noodles.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, JC had some of his friend's noodle dish that had been bought from a restaurant the night before and had been left in the fridge overnight.
When JC ate the noodles though, he immediately started to feel ill.
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The report indicates that the patient had a severely high temperature, a pulse of 166 beats per minute, and had to be sedated. He was so ill that he had to be taken to the intensive care unit of another hospital by helicopter to receive further treatment.
JC had no known allergies and had received his childhood vaccinations, and while he wasn't a big drinker, he admitted to smoking two packs of cigarettes each week and marijuana on a daily basis.
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."
In a YouTube video exploring the case, 'Dr Bernard' explained what happened to JC's body after eating the dish, stating that he likely contracted an aggressive bacterial infection.
In less than 24 hours after eating the food, JC's kidneys had failed and he started having blood clots.
Blood test results from the previous hospital found that he had a bacterium in his blood called Neisseria meningitidis. This can cause a Meningococcal disease that can lead to an inappropriate clotting of blood within the vessels.
"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," Dr Bernard explained in the video.
"It is swollen because the blood vessels dilate so that more blood 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."
"Little clots [start to] form everywhere, as they get lodged into small blood vessels blocking blood flow," he continued. "As his hands and feet become cold, they are starved of oxygen."
The oxygen-starved tissues can turn necrotic for a thrombotic condition called Purpura fulminans that rapidly leads to necrosis.
While JC did stabilise, the tissue on his fingers and on his legs down to his feet developed gangrene. He had to have parts of all 10 fingers amputated, as well as a bilateral below-knee amputations.
26 days after the incident, JC became conscious and his condition improved.
Dr Bernard said that evidence suggests that the food wasn't good ,but they couldn't identify for sure how JC developed the infection, as the bacteria that causes it usually spread through saliva.
It was a 'freak accident' and they may never find out how the bacteria came to be in the food in the first place.
Interestingly, JC had received his first meningococcal vaccine before middle school, though he had never had the booster shot recommended four years later.