Student Suffers Loss Of Limbs After Eating Bad Leftovers

A 19-year-old man was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of this hospital because of shock, multiple organ failure, and rash.

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.

What followed is a tale of nightmarish proportions as the patient proceeded to have "amputations of parts of all 10 of JC's fingers and amputations of his legsbelow the knees" among other major complications including a rash that indicated his skin was essentially dying. 

That original case was published in The New England Journal of Medicine back in March of 2021 but it's just now going viral because of this YouTube video by Chubbyemu AKA 'Dr. Bernard' (apparently a pharmacist & not a physician but whatevs) who makes videos analyzing interesting medical cases: 

According to Newsweek, doctors narrowed the cause of the illness down to the food after the person he'd been staying with noted they'd also vomited, but had then quickly recovered. 

Following blood and urine tests, the young man, who worked part-time in a restaurant and was staying with a friend for five days following admission to college, was diagnosed with a potentially deadly bacterial infection called Neisseria meningitidis, which caused his blood to clot and his liver to fail.

JC's skin necrosis was the result of a condition called "purpura fulminans"—a rare and severe complication of meningococcal septicemia.

Doctors discovered that JC had only received one of three doses of meningococcal conjugate vaccine without a booster, and had also only had one dose of the serogroup B meningococcal vaccine out of two or three doses recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Absolute nightmare. He was just guy-being-a-dude-ing, visiting a friend, dealing with college admissions.. And how many of us have eaten some leftovers that deep down we knew could mayyyyybe be a little sketch? (When I was college- aged and hungover enough I'd eat pretty much anything I found sitting out on our rugby house's coffee table the next morning. It could have bites taken out of it & didn't even have to be recognizable.) And often times you don't even think it's a little sketch until you're bent over the toilet praying to the porcelain Gods. 

Whew. I was glad to see that 'The authors of the paper conclude by saying that JC recovery from his condition has been "mostly good,"' and I hope he continues to get better.