A Scientist Huffed Gas From A Balloon. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys.

Hey, Dr Bernard here. This case was recorded in  October 1841. It was published in a book in 1908.   Humans react to chemicals the same  way today, as they did back then.   Parts of I’ve adapted for today, but  I’ve preserved as much of the original   description as possible. The poisoning  still happens today, in a working space   that didn’t exist in the 1800s, all of which,  I will tell you about later in this video. A Scientist Inhaled 3 Liters of Gas he made in  a balloon. This Is what happened to his kidneys. MB is a 31 year old man, presenting to the  emergency room with a pain between his legs.   He tells the admitting nurse  that over the last four hours,   he kept emptying his stomach into  the laboratory sink. At first,   it was forcefully projectile, but as the  time continued, it became green in color. MB was a scientist writing a book about chemicals.   He had a good career and a  good reputation as a teacher. MB loved to make jokes in the lab. Science is  supposed to be fun, he thought. He would make   gases from chemical reactions and inhale them.  This would change his voice for a short amount   of time. All of his students found this  hilarious. His voice could become high,   his voice could become low. He  found this effect funny. And   he kept thinking of new ways to inhale  different gases, to “find his voice.” One day, MB mixed some metal shavings with  sulfuric acid. He collected the resulting hydrogen   gas in a ballon, knowing that it would make his  voice an exceptionally high pitch, and because   this gas is light, it would just make its way out  of his lungs, and it’ll be no problem he thought. Immediately after inhaling what was  supposed to be hydrogen gas in the balloon,   MB felt light like a feather. His voice was  high pitched and he could hear the resonance   ring throughout his skull as he felt like he was  floating around in the air. Looking at the ballon,   he saw there was enough for one more, as he  breathed it in, and he felt on top of the   world. He was seized with giddiness and his vision  felt lightweight, as it started turning dark. But   then he started to notice that he was shivering  and shaking. At first it was subtle, but then he   noticed that his legs started to hurt. The pain  got worse and worse as he could start to feel his   heart beating in his feet, as his hands started  tingling and going numb. He went into the bathroom   and noticed that his urine could only trickle  out, and what did come out was a deep red color. As the hours passed, contents from MB’s  stomach kept coming up. It was projectile   before it became green and it brought him down  to the floor. He struggled to call for 911,   and he’s brought to the  emergency room where we are now. At examination, the medical team noticed that MB’s  skin felt cold to the touch, his heart rate was   high and his stomach contents that came up were  green, maybe a little yellow. When he could talk,   his voice seemed weak. His face and the whites  of his eyes were also a greenish-yellow color   meaning he’s jaundiced. The color comes  from a chemical called bilirubin something   that makes feces brown and is produced from  breaking down red blood cells in the liver,   all of this meaning that there could be some  liver damage happening to MB. He told them   about the hydrogen gas that he inhaled before this  happened, but he was unsure if it really was the   gas causing all these problems because  hydrogen doesn’t just do something like this. As the night continued, the  team noted that every hour,   on the hour, MB would have a stomach movement  come up out his mouth. They noticed that his   urine was still red. But as the hours passed,  they noticed t hat MB stops urinating. He seems   bloated. His face and his belly are swollen as  if he’s retaining the fluid that should be urine. A blood test finds that MB has anemia. An-  meaning without and -emia meaning presence of   blood. Something called hemoglobin was low in  his blood, which is the protein that carries   oxygen throughout the body. Without oxygen  going to vital parts like the brain,   bad things can start to happen.  But examining his red urine,   they find that what’s making it  red is huge amounts of hemoglobin. Clearly, something is happening to  his liver if he appears jaundiced.   And if he had hemoglobinuria before he  completely stopped making urine altogether,   then it means something happened to his kidneys  too, but why? MB inhaled what should have been   hydrogen gas. Typically you don’t get sick  like this just by breathing that in, but   everything started to go wrong after that  particular moment. If he inhaled something,   then why are bad things happening to  his liver and kidneys and not his lungs? In the lungs, the oxygen from the air, is  exchanged for carbon dioxide from the blood.   If inhaled gas from the lungs goes directly  into the blood, and MB noticed blood in his   urine before he presented to the emergency  room, then it means that gas may have done   something to his blood. That “bad blood” could  have flown into his kidneys and become his urine,   and this gives the medical team  some clues as to what’s happening. As the days pass, MB’s vomiting episodes become  less frequent. His jaundice disappeared. It   looked like he was getting better. But then  doctors noticed that he was bloated like he   was holding on to water. They noticed that  he hadn’t urinated for several days now.   When they inserted a catheter in to his bladder  to drain it hoping there’d be a bunch of urine   in there, they find that it’s completely  empty. MB’s kidneys have completely stopped   working. But he didn’t appear to have anything  wrong with his brain. He could respond to   commands, he could hold conversation, he knew  where he was, but as the fifth day of being   in the hospital continued, he started to become  drowsy, and tired. There could be something wrong   with his brain, but that’s not likely given he  could speak, and move. But all of that could mean   that not enough oxygen might be getting  to his brain for some reason, bringing   us back to his anemia, his hemoglobinuria,  and the idea of gas exchange in the lungs. Analysis of the metal shavings and the sulfuric  acid that MB used to create the hydrogen gas   that he packed into his lungs finds substantial  contamination of the element arsenic. If the   mixture reacted to form gas, then it means  that the “hydrogen” MB thought he inhaled,   was arsine. This toxic gas exchanged in his lungs  and started pushing into his blood. It started   spreading everywhere all throughout his body,  and this explains everything happening to him.
  Air that we breathe in is not mostly oxygen,  it’s almost 80% nitrogen. On the periodic table,   nitrogen is a light element, it’s one of  the most abundant elements in living beings,   it’s mostly a gas on earth, but when it’s combined  with hydrogen, it becomes ammonia. In a column,   known as a group, on the table, elements have  similar features. They’re not exactly the same   because as you go down the column, elements get  heavier. They become more unstable, meaning they   could be more reactive. If Nitrogen and hydrogen  make up ammonia, then phosphorous, which is also   abundant in the body can combine with hydrogen  and make Phosphine, which is a poison gas that   can cause spontaneous human combustion when in  the body. This also means arsenic can combine with   hydrogen to make Arsine, which is what MB inhaled  when he produced the gas in his balloon from   contaminated reagents. These chemical properties  don’t tell us directly how and why bad things   happen when someone inhales arsine gas. It’s  not immediately obvious and experiments haven’t   given us a better idea at the moment. But we do  know WHAT happens, because it’s happening to MB. In the blood cells, arsine weakens  the globin chains holding down heme.   We know this because this only happens  to regular hemoglobin that’s found in   all healthy humans. It doesn’t happen to  hemoglobin exposed to carbon monoxide,   the chemical known to bind stronger to hemoglobin  than oxygen and can cause someone to suffocate   when it’s present. Arsine strips out the heme  in regular hemoglobin of a red blood cell,   and sends the heme to float around in the body and  this is one part of where the problems come from. Heme contains iron. The form of iron that arsine  strips out is reactive. It can cause damage to   all different parts of the body. One of the places  in the body that can’t handle this reactive iron   is the kidneys. The heme lodges into the  tubules and this pigment causes oxidative damage   necrosis as the tissue dies. In MB, this is what  happened to him because he started urinating a red   color. It explains his anemia because the  hemoglobin was getting cut out by arsine. And it   explains the hemoglobin in the urine before  his kidneys completely stopped working   and he no longer made any urine for  days while he was in the hospital. The idea of poison arsenic goes back to  ancient times. It was used as a pesticide,   and the Romans knew it as the King of Poisons,  it was a poison of Kings because it was an   untraceable way to get rid of someone. English  sources say that the French at one point   knew arsenic as the Powder of Inheritance,  where it was used in untraceable deaths of   the elderly. “I totally have no idea what  happened to them, they just got sick from   the food!” would be brought up to insurers,  and wealth and an estate would be passed on. But while the ancient world knew arsenic as  a poison, it also knew it as a medicine. In   Han Dynasty China 2000 years ago, a published  book titled the Shennong Bencao Jing 神農本草經 is   an ancient pharmacopoeia, still available  in print today. It recorded the use of an   arsenic compound to treat jaundice, ulcers,  parasitic infections and malignant growths. What’s poison becomes medicine, and what’s old  becomes new again, bringing us to today. In 1971,   in Harbin city in the north of China,  the local government caught wind of an   herbalist dispensing cancer treatments.  They sent an official to inspect   what exactly these treatments were and they  discovered it was a mix of toad extract,   mercuric oxide, and arsenic trioxide. This mixture  was tested in a particular blood cancer called   Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia. Promyelocyte being  a young, immature type of blood cell. Leuk from   Greek Leukos meaning white referring to the kind  of blood cell and -emia meaning presence in blood.   Immature white blood cell presence in blood. This  appears in the body as a cancer. Arsenic trioxide   was used to achieve complete remission in 21 out  of 32 patients with this particular blood cancer,   published in Chinese medical literature in 1992  with study rational deriving from a fusion of   traditional and modern medical ideas. The  idea of arsenic as a treatment for Acute   Promyelocytic Leukemia crossed over from China to  one of the largest cancer centers in the United   States, Memorial Sloan Kettering. And published in  English literature in 1998, 11 of 12 patients with   Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia were in remission  after treatment containing, Arsenic Trioxide. Today, we see this in the news. American Football  player playing for the Houston Texans was recently   diagnosed with Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia,  his treatment may contain therapeutic arsenic as   it is a standard of care. Semiconductor  manufacturing to make computer chips relies   on a step that needs ion implantation, where  a gas is used to implant a metal on the wafer,   and it’s here where arsenic is deposited  on chips through the use of Arsine gas,   as it’s used today. This is an occupational  hazard for people working in this space   that happens today, in a workspace that didn’t  exist in the 1800s, bringing us back to MB. On his 6th day in the hospital, MB passed 7  stools that were likely a watery consistency   consistent with arsenic poisoning. The medical  team found that he did make some urine,   but all of it was red. As the day passed, he  became weak and bloated as the sun started set. Arsine gas was discovered in 1775. The first  recorded case of poisoning was in 1815 in Germany,   where the chemist accidentally exposed himself to  the gas. These accidents would happen around the   time the hot air balloon was invented, because  to inflate the balloon with hydrogen gas,   sulfuric acid was mixed with iron, and  because both would be contaminated with   arsenic, people exposed would suffer illness  and be found not alive days later, just like MB. At autopsy, doctors tested MB’s body fluids. They  found the same concentration of arsenic that was   found in the sulfuric acid, and the metal shavings  that he used to make the gas that he inhaled. The test that doctors used to find the  arsenic in MB is the same test that put a   stop to the French calling arsenic the powder  of inheritance, because it’s easily provable   once the arsenic can be detected. But as  sophisticated as doctors were at the time   to detect arsenic after the fact, they didn’t  know how to treat arsine gas poisoning back then. Today, we can try to stop the kidney damage from  arsine by exchange transfusion. This will take   out the patient’s broken blood, and replace  it with donor blood that doesn’t have arsenic   in it. Today, Sulfuric acid doesn’t, shouldn’t,  have arsenic contamination in it, iron still does   sometimes. In everyday life, regular people aren’t  typically going to come into abundant contact with   arsenic and arsine gas. General rule of thumb  in line with MB’s case, if you don’t need to put   it in your lungs, don’t put it in your lungs. If  recognized early and if the arsine exposure wasn’t   too much, patients can come out OK. For MB, given  that he was alive 6 more days in the hospital   after he accidentally inhaled that 3 liters of  Arsine gas, he could have been saved if his case   happened today, but they didn’t know how or have  the tools to do so back then on October 23, 1841. Thanks so much for watching. Take  care of yourself and be well.

Channel: Chubbyemu

Views: 1,064,289

Keywords: DubbedWithAloud

Id: LnkwxKHVLeU

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Plylyfe]

Class, I snorted a ballon full of poisonous gas and I'm starting to feel the effects hahahahahaha... man.

[u/Sweet-Efficiency7466]

And he would make a full recovery