Hey, Dr Bernard here. This video is based on a case that is published
in literature, link is in the description below. I don’t intend to scare anyone about food
or leftovers. I’ll be eating leftovers for dinner tonight,
just like I do every day. This was a freak accident happening in a perfect
storm sequence of events, as I will show you. I publish a video every month, so if you hit
subscribe and the bell for notifications, we can have some leftover food, together. A Student Ate His Roommate’s Leftover Noodles
For Lunch. This Is What Happened To His Limbs. JC is a 19 year old man, presenting to the
emergency room with muscle pain, chills, and shortness of breath. Five hours earlier, a purplish discoloration
that looked like bruises had developed on his skin, and his roommate immediately drove
him to the hospital. In the car, JC could barely move his head
because his neck was so stiff but it didn’t matter anymore because his vision was starting
to go dark. One day earlier, JC was on his regular schedule. He was hungry for lunch, but it was cold outside. Food wasn’t easy to come by but his roommate
had gone out to eat the night before and brought back leftovers. “Hes not really gonna care if I eat this,
he wasn’t going to finish it anyways,” JC thought. Immediately after eating the meal of leftover
chicken, and noodles, JC didn’t feel well. He could feel his stomach shake and convulse. As the hours passed, JC could feel a blanket
of pain covering his stomach. He felt like there was gas, but there was
no flatulence. A pool of sour saliva flooded in under his
tongue, and he felt a stinging sensation ripple in to his cheeks as he was brought down to
the floor. He huddled over the toilet as a stream of
stomach contents pushed up every couple minutes as he felt his eyes squeezing out of his skull. Laying down now in a world of hurt, JC felt
cold. He started shivering. His arms and legs felt weak and clammy and
the blanket of pain started spreading to his chest. It was getting harder to breathe. His head started pounding. He slowly became unaware of his surroundings. When his roommate came back, JC couldn’t
turn his head to look at him, and his vision was pulsating and starting to blur. That food must have been no good, he thought. “I ate your leftovers for lunch, but they
came right back up,” JC said. “Sorry, I shoulda just tossed it, I didn’t
finish that dinner because I barfed it up too,” his roommate said. As the night passed, JC could feel his heart
pounding in his chest. His roommate was fine. JC’s head hurt so bad that he was in a fetal
position the entire night. “What was it about those leftovers?” He thought. “I shouldn’t have eaten them for sure,”
he thought. As the sun started to rise, JC tried to get
up to brush his teeth. He noticed some bruising on his arms and legs
that weren’t there the day before as he put the toothbrush in his mouth. But everything was in a state of pain and
it was just too much. Knowing an ambulance would be too expensive,
he begged his roommate to drive him to the hospital as he’s brought to the emergency
room, where we are now. At examination, JC was responsive, alert and
conscious, but his skin was kind of pale. He had a fever. JC’s heart beat was fast, heart rhythm was
normal, but his blood pressure was high, and he had tachypnea. Tachy meaning fast and pnea referring to breath. As doctors were examining him, JC empties
his stomach all over the floor. Doctors noticed it was a greenish yellow color,
not really looking like any particular kind of food. Doctors drew some blood to test and to get
a better idea of what’s happening. But as the minutes pass, JC’s tachypnea
started to get worse as he was gasping for air and his face was starting to turn gray. JC has hypoxemia. Hypo meaning low. Ox referring to oxygen and emia meaning presence
in blood. Low oxygen presence in blood, but how could
this be? He’s breathing faster than normal, and it’s
the same air everyone else in the emergency room is breathing, and no one else is gasping
like how JC is. Doctors put him on supplemental oxygen to
try and fix this. As the hour continues, JC’s blood pressure
drops to half of what it was when he arrived to the emergency room. The nurse used a vein in his leg to administer
medicine to stimulate his heart to try and get it to beat harder to increase his blood
pressure. Doctors sedate him and stick a tube down his
throat so that a machine can breathe for him. But it wasn’t enough. JC’s blood pressure kept dropping. But then doctors started to notice a rash
containing small spots were emerging all over his body. At first this mottled appearance looked like
bruises but then they became a deep reddish brown, well defined at the edges, and multiple
lesions like this started appearing all over his body. But how could this happen after eating food
that made him and his roommate sick? The fever. The sudden drop in blood pressure. The hypoxemia and the diffuse rash. All of this pointing to a sudden, terrible
infection spreading all over JC’s body, as doctors start him on broad spectrum antibiotics. They dont know exactly what bacteria they’re
dealing with. They dont know what could have caused this
to happen. The best they can do until they find out,
is to give an antibiotic that covers many different bacteria. But things are only getting worse. Doctors try to push more medicines in to his
body to keep his blood pressure up because it keeps going down. Low pressure means blood can’t get to his
organs as they start shutting down. They call for a helicopter because he needs
to be transported to another hospital with more resources. In the second hospital now, doctors notice
that JC’s hands and feet are cold. Usually, you can feel a pulse, the heart beating,
by the hands and the feet. But the medical team couldn’t feel one for
JC. The lesions look like more than just bruises
now and they’ve spread everywhere. Occasionally, JC would open his eyes, and
he would just stare blankly into the void. His pupils still reacted to light. This reflex is natural in humans and means
that the brain is still in tact. Both his pupils were the same size, so this
tells doctors that his brain is OK, at least for now. What isn’t OK is JC’s kidneys. At the previous hospital, before putting him
into the helicopter, the medical team had placed a catheter, that is a tube that will
empty the urine in his bladder. But as it turns out, there is no urine in
his bladder because his kidneys haven’t made any, and they’ve completely shut down. Another blood test finds that JC has thrombocytopenia. Thromb from Ancient Greek Thrombos meaning
a lump or a piece. Cyto meaning cell. And Penia from Ancient Greek referring to
Poverty but in this case referring to deficiency. A deficiency of cell pieces known as thrombocytes,
which are also called platelets. But what does this mean? You see, blood has the ability to coagulate,
it can clump together to form a kind of jelly like consistency. This is called a thrombus made from thrombocytes. Another word for all of this is blood clot. This usually happens in times where the body
wants to stop you from bleeding. If clots are made of thrombocytes, but JC
has a deficiency of thrombocytes, then it means that he can’t make any more new blood
clots, which would mean that he can’t stop bleeding. That could explain his bruise-like rashes
all over his body. But JC doesn’t have a history of bleeding
problems. He was healthy and fine less than 24 hours
ago before he ate his roommate’s leftover food, meaning at some time in between, this
thrombocytopenia developed. If his thrombocytes weren’t low before,
but are low now suddenly, what happened to them? They could have been destroyed. The remnants of those destroyed would have
had to exit JC’s body in some form. But where from? He emptied his stomach multiple times after
he had ate that food. Platelets don’t just float into the stomach
to be pushed out. JC hasn’t made any urine so they wouldn’t
have exited from there either, so it’s not likely they were destroyed. Instead, this could mean JC’s thrombocytopenia
could be because his body has consumed all of his thrombocytes by making clots everywhere
in his body, but where exactly would they be? When JC presented to the emergency room at
the first hospital, the medical team drew blood and sent it to a lab so they could try
and grow the bacteria. On the phone now with the previous hospital,
the medical team are told the results. The species found in JC’s blood was Neisseria
meningitidis. The stiff neck. The nausea declining quickly into respiratory
collapse and shock. The thrombocytopenia and multi organ failure. The rash on his cold hands and feet. Doctors had already suspected meningococcemia,
meningococcal bacteria presence in blood, by the time these results were confirmed,
but at less than 24 hours after eating his roommate’s leftover food for lunch, JC’s
kidneys, lungs, heart and blood have all shut down. Even though this is a meningococcal bacterial
infection, it doesn’t appear to be meningitis, the inflammation of the meninges the membranes
that protect the brain and the spinal cord, even though he had a stiff neck, called nuchal
rigidity. But when he presented to the emergency room,
he was conscious and everything about his brain seemed to be OK. Instead, the bacteria flooded in to his blood
stream, so this isn’t meningitis but it’s meningococcemia. But why is this happening? This brings us back to his blood clots. We can already see where they are. When JC’s body started to react to the meningococcemia,
the immune system started responding. It’s kind of like getting a cut on your
skin, the bleeding stops eventually because of blood clot, and then the area around the
cut becomes swollen and warm. It’s swollen because the blood vessels dilate,
so that more blood cells can get to the area, and the swelling is partly due to the fact
that there’s increased fluid and warmth is the inflammation. But when bacteria is present in the blood,
the entire body’s blood vessels dilate, dropping the blood pressure, preventing oxygen
from getting in to the organs. Thrombocytes are consumed causing little clots
to form everywhere, as they get lodged into small blood vessels, blocking blood flow. As his hands and feet become cold, they starving
of oxygen. A pulse can’t be felt because nothing is
flowing through, as the tissue starts to necrose. The bruising happens because the remaining
blood that didn’t clot has become thin and is flowing out looking like a bleed. All of this is called Purpura fulminans. Fulminans from Latin Fulmen meaning lightning
or thunderbolt, in this case referring to something happening suddenly and Purpura from
Greek referring to the color of the bruise that appears suddenly. As the days pass, JC is stabilized, but parts
of the tissue on his fingers have necrosed and caused gangrene. Both of his legs down to his feet were also
necrosed to the point, that they needed to be amputated, because the tissue can cause
even more problems if it starts floating around JC’s body. And they were amputated. The Neisseria meningitidis bacteria is known
to spread through saliva, not through the air, which brings us to the final point. JC’s roommate threw up after eating parts
of his meal the night before. These became the leftovers that JC ate the
next day, not knowing this had happened. This kind of reaction is generally not normal
with food, but as doctors got more medical history on JC, they found that he only received
the first dose of the meningococcal vaccine just before middle school and not the booster
recommended 4 years later at age 16. A second, Serogroup B meningococcal vaccine
is usually required for people entering university, which also consists of 2 separate doses, given
a couple months apart. JC had gotten this one, but again, only one
dose. The evidence appears to point to the food
being bad, and that’s a freak accident. We’ll never know exactly what happened to
it to cause it to have Neisseria meningitidis on it, it would be hard to even culture and
grow it specifically from the noodles, but we know that bacteria is transmitted through
saliva. It made his roommate throw it back up, his
roommate was up to date on his vaccination schedule, this bacteria doesn’t just materialize
out of nowhere, and it caused this infection, it caused parts of JC’s limbs to necrose. And the missed partial vaccines twice on JC’s
part was another accident that happened at this particular place, at this particular
time. As JC’s organ function starts to come back
26 days later, he becomes conscious again and hes moved to the stepdown unit as his
condition starts to improve. Blood products were given to him to replenish
the correct coagulation factors in the ICU and other anticoagulants were given aggresively. The bacteria was handled promptly with the
correct antibiotics, but the illness caused by it lasted for days. He isn’t critically ill anymore, but he
has permanent changes on his body now, as he was able to make a recovery. Thanks so much for watching. Take care of yourself. And be well.
I love chubby emu's videos.
Wow who would have thought, that eating left over food could be almost a death sentence.... yikes
This made me scared enough to pull up my health records. Wow. Thankfully he was able to recover. I hope he's doing better now.
I am in no way blaming the victim, but it states that he had only 1 of 3 the meningitis vaccines. I know there are different types of meningitis, but would the full vaccination have helped? His friend ate the same food and only vomited once (it does not mention his vaccination status).