Death On A Dare?

"He didn't respond to any of the stimuli that we gave him."

"He had some clonus, which is just elevated reflexes. It's a sign that basically the nervous system wasn't working very well."

"We were more aggressive than had been reported before in terms of bringing his sodium back down to a safer range."

Dr.David J. Carlberg, emergency room doctor, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Washington, D.C.

 

The Journal of Emergency Medicine reported in 2013 one of the really unthinkingly stupid actions that can be taken when young men whose brains evidently have not yet fully developed do things that may threaten they will never develop, such as courting death and almost succeeding. There's no word in the report whether the 19-year-old from Virginia feels his experience was worth it, to have it reported as one of the zaniest potentially self-harming incidents ever recorded in the journal. It might make for a great conversational gambit but for the fact that with a mature mind, it resembles juvenile delinquency at its best.

19-year-old John Paul Boldrick, in the company of a group of his peers that he might have considered to be friends, accepted a dare and downed a quart of soy sauce, known for its salt content and usually used sparely as a condiment alongside Asian food. He is now acknowledged to be the first known individual to have overdosed on soy sauce, yet suffered no permanent neurological damage. Needless to say, given his free choice of response to a dare, he might not have had too developed a brain to begin with, and any loss, however minimal due to excessive salt intake might have rendered him intellectually sub-par with a vengeance.

Soon after drinking the stuff, twitching and seizures erupted, prompting his friends to rush the fellow with impaired judgement to hospital. Once in the emergency room he had slipped into a coma, and was foaming at the mouth. The result of having ingested around 56,000 milligrams of sodium contained in the amount of soy sauce he poured into his throat, down his gullet into his stomach. Hypernatremia resulted from the surge of salt that assaulted his bloodstream. 

Hypernatremia is observed generally in mentally ill people who happen to relish an absolute excess of salt intake. The condition erupts when too much water is lost, or the body takes in too much sodium for regulation by normal body action to balance such a situation. Surrounding tissues are then called upon by the body to surrender their water, in an effort to dilute the deluge of salt. The major symptoms of hypernatremia are extreme thirst to balance excessive salt; acute fatigue, muscle spasms and confusion. 

Soy sauce can be deadly at high levels.  Shutterstock

 

In the most severe of such cases the brain can be leached of its water, which causes it to shrink, to bleed or for seizures to erupt. Left untreated, coma and death are in the offing. In the case of this young patient admitted to MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, attending medical staff swiftly administered a cocktail of water and dextrose through a nasal tube, pumping six litres into his system in the space of 30 minutes, enabling his sodium levels to return to normal in the next five hours.

The fortunate young man with the faulty sense of survival in the interests of 'proving himself', emerged from his coma without further intervention, once three more days had passed. Authors of the study -- the emergency medical staff at the hospital -- wrote of this rare encounter, outstanding for the amount of salt in his system. Some residual effects were identified as a result of the seizures suffered, but with the passage of a month, all overdose signs disappeared.