40.<\/p>\n
“There was a 24-year-old patient who was brought in from a jail in a rural county. He was working on a roadside cleanup when he found a bottle in a ditch that he thought contained alcohol, and he quickly chugged it down. To be fair, it did look like whiskey. It wasn’t. It turns out it was a substance that contained sulfuric acid. Its pH was less than 2.5…it just ate up the litmus paper. So shortly after he got to the ICU, he was in excruciating pain and vomiting blood.”<\/p>\n
“The gastroenterologist took him to do an EGD (basically a procedure where they can look at the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum with a camera attached to a flexible tube), and the pictures were horrendous. You could literally see his stomach and esophageal mucosa eroding away.<\/p>\n
He had to be sent off to another hospital where they had an esophageal surgeon who could repair the mess. He, of course, needed multiple surgeries and had a very long hospital stay. I saw him a few months later when he was admitted for another issue. He was down to 90 pounds (from about 150) and was getting fed through a PEG tube.<\/p>\n
He was very lucky to be young and otherwise healthy (but obviously not very smart).”<\/p>\n