Sunday, December 2, 2012

Nurse: 50cc's Johny Walker, Stat!

Gotta love the Kiwi's:

"The 65-year-old Taranaki man suddenly went blind when vodka he had been drinking reacted with his diabetes medication. He regained his sight only after hospital staff administered expensive whisky."

Seems that the gentleman, a catering tutor, was celebrating his parents' 50th wedding anniversary (yeah, I didn't get the math there, either) with hooch his students had gifted him. When he found himself unable to see, he made haste to the nearest hospital. As surgeons cut him open, they got a string whiff of "nail polish remover" and believed they'd found formaldehyde poisoning. The standard treatment is to administer ethanol, which tends to counteract the methanol (a component of formaldehyde):

"Auckland City Hospital intensive care medicine specialist Tony Smith said administering ethanol was a well-established treatment for methanol poisoning.

It worked because the ethanol competed with the methanol and prevented it from being metabolised into harmful formaldehyde, which can cause blindness
."

So what was this magic potion?

"Johnnie Walker Black Label. It was good whisky, yeah."

L'chaim!

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