THE PROBLEM: A 22 year-old man vacations in the tropics, and falls sick while on the plane coming back to the States. Above is the X-ray that shows what happened. Can you decipher it, and diagnose the problem?
DIAGNOSIS: The man was a "Mule" for heroin smugglers. He had several condoms filled with heroin in his stomach, large intestine and colon. One of them burst spilling a potentially lethal amount of the drug into his system.
I have to confess that I don't see any of that in the X-ray. I guess you have to have a trained eye.
DIAGNOSIS: The X-ray shows "miliary infiltrates" in both lungs, which I assume means fungus tendrils. About 5% of workers who clean up bat and bird droppings in a confined space get this problem.
DIAGNOSIS: Shingles. It's an intensely painful viral condition which you're vulnerable to if you had chicken pox when you were a kid. Usually it lasts only a few weeks, but it can also last a long time and cause blindness or paralysis. It's very important to get fast treatment.
DIAGNOSIS: a ruptured spleen. The abdominal organs most affected by traumatic injury to the side are the spleen and the liver. Even a small injury to the spleen can turn into something serious and cause a lot of internal bleeding.
The kid's dad was smart to take him to the emergency ward right after the injury. Time is of the essence in cases like this.
Interesting, huh? here's the site address:
In the first X-Ray, if you look closely at the bottom half of the picture, you can see the condom-filled drugs inside the system.
ReplyDeleteI always wonder why there are people desperate enough to do that. I always imagine that it's painful to have that go through your system.
That said, sounds like a fun game for medical students.
This reminds me of this show called Mystery Diagnosis where the patients desperately seek answers for conditions and diseases the doctors just can't seem to diagnose correctly because often the conditions they have are really rare and obscure. It's a really fascinating show. Diagnosis: Unknown was a similar show on Discovery Health I used to watch all the time as a kid. My parents even used to think that I wanted to become a doctor because I watched so much of this stuff then. Go figure.
ReplyDelete