from Hacker News

Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him

by sipofwater on 10/9/25, 7:11 AM with 59 comments

• by scandox on 10/9/25, 8:50 AM

  A former policeman told me about a case he dealt with in the late 1970s. A man had got up in the morning, had breakfast, got in his car and drove off to work. Halfway to work he had coughed a large amount of blood onto the windscreen of his car, collapsed over the wheel and died - crashing the car in the process.

  He interviewed the man's spouse. They had a cocktail party at home the previous night and had been drinking heavily. At a certain point in the evening her husband had knocked back his drink so energetically that he had swallowed the cocktail pick along with the drink. The people talking to him saw what happened and everybody thought this was extremely funny, including her husband.

  The pathologist confirmed that the cocktail pick had worked its way through the lining of his oesophagus and had eventually reached his heart.

• by doctorhandshake on 10/9/25, 9:15 AM

  A good example of one of my favorite diagnostic axioms, Hickam’s dictum:

  Hickam's dictum is a medical principle that a patient's symptoms could be caused by several diseases. It is a counterargument to misapplying Occam's razor in the medical profession. A common version of Hickam's dictum states: "A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases."

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickam%27s_dictum

• by d--b on 10/9/25, 9:52 AM

  "This one seems ready-made for a television medical drama"

  Yep! In fact there was an episode of House MD where the patient had ingested a toothpick and had all sort of symptoms like these.

• by silexia on 10/9/25, 2:16 PM

  I have now gone over 1,000 days without drinking alcohol. I was not an alcoholic as conventionally defined, I drank less than what my friends or colleagues or others around me did. But occasionally I would drink a few too many and not feel well the next day. I began tracking exactly how many drinks a day I had (I did not drink every day), and it was eye opening. I decided to cut down from there and after a few years of trying I eliminated alcohol entirely from my diet.

  I highly recommend every person that drinks alcohol track the number of drinks you have on a calendar and rate how you feel the next day.

• by mvdtnz on 10/9/25, 1:02 PM

  The author says "This one seems ready-made for a television medical drama." In fact an almost identical case was featured in House when a Romani teenager swallowed a toothpick. The episode was titled Needle in a Haystack in season 3.

• by konart on 10/9/25, 10:39 AM

  >A mild, dull pain had developed in the patient's right lower abdomen and back. Nine days later, a fever and body aches also developed. The next day, he went to urgent care, where clinicians gave him intravenous fluids and an intravenous pain reliever.

  Seriously? All this and you just get some painkillers?

• by Aldipower on 10/9/25, 9:29 AM

  "They also looked at his medical history, which was relatively short. He was born in Central America, but he had lived in the US for 16 years."

  Interesting constellation of sentences. So, the most important thing in a medical history seems to be where you've been born. Is Central America or the US better/worse for your health I wonder? That is not going to be clear here.

• by pfannkuchen on 10/9/25, 3:26 PM

  I wonder what unknown condition this woman had? And if the condition itself is what caused her to get so close to homicide, or if it was the man’s drunken behavior?

• by SanjayMehta on 10/9/25, 8:43 AM

  House, MD had an episode with the same scenario.

  Also, Sherwood Anderson in real life.

• by burnt-resistor on 10/10/25, 7:41 AM

  Now I want ChubbyEmu to do a video on this and perhaps one on a case of ingestion of a grill brush brass bristle. And obligatory plug of @SmarterEveryDay's chain mail brush.

• by Dilettante_ on 10/9/25, 10:51 AM

  Save you the handful of minutes of skimming: He swallowed a toothpick. "Medical mystery" my foot.

• by jonathanlydall on 10/9/25, 9:35 AM

  These days I look somewhat disdainfully upon heavy drinkers, not only do they often disturb others when drinking (being noisy, obtrusive, drunk driving, etc.), but even ignoring long term health effects, I'm in my 40s now and it's definitely a factor too, but for at least a day after even very moderate drinking I know my mental faculties are reduced, so I can only imagine how much theirs are.

  I very rarely have alcohol these days, it's just not worth the feeling of fatigue and brain fogginess the next day that's pretty much guaranteed for me afterwards, even from just 2 beers.

  I suspect it's not unique to South Africa, but there is a somewhat pervasive culture here of excessive drinking. Back when I lived in a complex, I would often see people pitch up in the common area at midday with a cooler box full of beer, and basically sit there for the next 6 hours just drinking, what a waste of a day in my view. And most people don't even raise an eyebrow when someone casually mentions in the workplace this is how they spent their weekend. That the police here are both incompetent and readily bribe-able also makes the effects of excessive drinking particularly pronounced, like traffic lights being regularly knocked over.

• by lwansbrough on 10/9/25, 8:17 AM

  Vibe based debugging. Very impressive.

  I’m surprised wood doesn’t show up more clearly on imaging though.