A Student Ate 108 Gummy Antacids For Breakfast.
This Is What Happened To Her Kidneys.
JT is a 22 year old woman, presenting to the emergency room confused.
Doctors held up 2 fingers and asked her how many they were holding up, and she responded
“11.”
When JT was in high school, something really, really terrible happened to her.
She always had some stomach pain as a kid.
Her parents thought it was heart burn from all the spicy food she would eat.
She’d eat a whole bag of hot chips and lie about it blaming it all on her brother.
But as time went on, her stomach pain kept getting worse.
One day, JT went to the bathroom after breakfast, and emptied her stomach in to the toilet.
It wasn’t just her breakfast that came up, it was blood, everywhere.
In the emergency room, doctors sent a camera down her throat to look inside her stomach,
and they found a giant ulcer.
Doctors took a sample of it, and determined that this was caused by bacteria that shouldn’t
have been there.
Ulcers are kind of like those sores you get in your mouth, but they’re in your stomach.
And the stomach has acid, which aggravates the ulcer making things hurt more and more.
The ulcer can dig deeper into the lining of the stomach like it did for JT causing a bleed,
explaining her hematemesis.
JT’s parents knew for sure, those spicy foods and hot chips she wouldn’t stop eating
caused the ulcer.
They argued with doctors, who knew this was caused by bacteria,— the spicy foods made
things worse, but they’re not the cause.
Doctors instructed her to stop eating that food, her parents were on board with that.
Doctors gave her antibiotics to kill the bacteria, and medicines to control her stomach acid.
And everything seemed to be OK.
JT was sent home and she was feeling great.
But a week later, JT’s personality started to shift.
Every morning when she woke up, she struggled with terrible and dark thoughts.
She would have random panic attacks where she felt like she couldn’t breathe.
At night time, she would have the awful feeling that she wasn’t going to make it.
She became a completely different person.
Her parents didn’t understand what was happening to her, but it was absolutely the doctors’
fault.
When they demanded an answer, the doctors said “you know, she’s 17 and going through
puberty, of course she’s gonna change.”
But JT’s parents argued back.
The doctors’ poisonous medicines were absolutely causing this, destroying their daughter’s
life.
And they weren’t going to take it.
Antibiotics can change the gut microbiome, which is the bacteria living in the stomach
and intestines.
More and more research suggests that that bacteria could have some impact on the brain,
so killing them with antibiotics taken by mouth, could change some balance in the body.
This is rare, but it might be a real reaction to the medicines the doctors thought, so they
wrote her a prescription for a different antibiotic, but JT and her parents had had enough.
Their truth was the spicy food alone was causing all of this, and so they threw the antibiotics
in the trash.
As the weeks and months passed, JT’s personality slowly reverted back to normal.
She turned to herbal supplements to help calm and cool her body down.
Occasionally, her stomach would hurt, but all of this seemed to pass.
The bleeding ulcer and the resulting personality change was the terrible thing that happened
in high school.
In her senior year of college now, the pharmacy where JT got her herbal supplements was out
of stock.
She knew from past experience that antacids like Tums and Alkaseltzer would help.
She felt like her ulcer never really went away.
Maybe she had grown out of the pain, or she had gotten used to it, but she still needed
something to neutralize her stomach acid, and live pain free.
JT found new GUMMY antacids.
Why not try it out? she thought.
Regular chewy tablets were chalky, she didn’t like that texture, so she bought some bottles
of the gummies, and started eating them.
At first, she would have just a few in the morning with breakfast.
But as the days passed, those gummy antacids BECAME her breakfast.
She noticed the more gummies she ate, the more spicy foods she could have.
Finally I can eat the food I want to eat, she thought
Antacids are usually made of calcium carbonate.
It neutralizes stomach acid and closes up the two part of the stomach where it connects
to the esophagus, helping with heart burn.
Someone on an internet forum said calcium was good especially for women to help build
up the bones, preventing osteoporosis, so not only was JT healing her stomach, she was
strengthening her bones, too, she thought.
And everything was good.
This was the best she had felt in years.
But then strange things started to happen.
She noticed she would urinate at least 2 times an hour throughout the day, to the point where
she had no idea where that water was coming from.
But then things started spiraling out of control.
One morning, she woke up at 7am.
When she was done brushing her teeth, it was 1 in the afternoon.
She had no idea how she brushed her teeth for 6 hours, but things kept getting worse.
One morning, JT tried to get out of bed, but her knees felt weak.
She sat at the computer watching a class lecture while eating her gummy antacid breakfast.
She didnt realize she ate 2 whole bottles totaling 108 gummies.
In the bathroom, dizzy.
JT fell down before emptying her stomach into the toilet, as she calls for 911 and she’s
brought to the emergency room where we are now.
At examination, doctors knew something was wrong.
Her reflexes were weak.
When they asked her who is the current president, she said Abraham Lincoln.
And when they asked her what is meant by the phrase, “don’t put all your eggs in 1
basket,” she stared off into space before responding “I like turtles”
Clearly, JT has something wrong with her brain due to the fact that she just ate 108 gummy
antacids for breakfast, but doctors don’t know that.
She isn’t in a mental state where she could tell them that, even if they asked.
A scan of her brain looked fine, it didn’t seem like anything was wrong just from the
picture, but as she sat in the emergency room waiting for doctors, she emptied her stomach
again on to her patient gown and had 2 more seizures before she was sent to the intensive
care unit where a blood test reveals that JT has hypercalcemia.
Hyper meaning high.
Calc referring to calcium, an important mineral and electrolyte in the body.
And Emia meaning presence in blood.
High calcium presence in blood.
If she ate 108 calcium carbonate gummies, and had been eating almost a bottle every
day, this makes sense why she would have high calcium presence in blood, but in the intensive
care unit, no one knows this is what happened.
Doctors do additional tests.
The calcium is so high in her blood, it’s life threatening.
And something that high doesnt happen on its own.
In the body, the bones are the largest stores of calcium.
Doctors need to make sure her bones aren’t dissolving in her body, leaking calcium everywhere.
This can happen because of a hormone imbalance or because of a tumor somewhere.
As the doctors await the test results, they find that JT is not only dehydrated, but that
her kidneys have started shutting down, but what does this have to do with gummy antacids?
How is this even remotely related to calcium carbonate?
You see, the body, especially the nerves and muscles, use electricity to send signals.
Electricity is like the plus and minus that you see on batteries, and, calcium has a plus
2 charge.
If there’s high calcium presence in blood, the calcium tends to block signals going in
to cells.
If the nerves and muscles rely on electricity to signal and do things, then if too much
calcium is around blocking those signals, then it explains why JT’s weak.
And why her brain can’t signal for her to speak coherently, before everything shut down
and she started having seizures.
But this isn’t her only problem.
In the kidneys, urine is produced by manipulating sodium, because wherever sodium is, water
will flow towards it.
In this small science experiment, I dissolve salt in this water and place it into a semi-permeable
tube.
I place the tube in a pool of distilled water and you’ll see that water flows towards
the sodium.
That water flows towards where there’s salt.
When urine is being made, the kidneys rely on electricity, balancing plus and minus charges.
Sodium is a + 1 charge and the kidneys do everything they can to hold on to enough sodium
to retain water so that the person doesn’t become dehydrated.
When too much calcium is present, it stops the kidneys from holding on to any sodium,
so everything becomes urine, causing massive water loss.
This is why JT couldn’t stop urinating during those days where she was eating gummy antacids
like candy.
But it’s still not over yet.
The blood is a soup of several chemicals.
Calcium has a tendency to make solid salts.
So big chemicals like phosphate and oxalate which you eat in your diet have negative charges and attract to calcium.
They grow in size, creating solids that collect in the kidneys, as stones form, blocking flow
and pointing to permanent damage in JT’s case.
All of this is called Milk Alkali Syndrome.
Ulcers aren’t uncommon, and they’re not new.
Humans have had them for thousands of years.
In the early 1900s, doctors thought maybe it was stomach acid flaring up, that would
keep irritating the ulcer, preventing it from healing.
Neutralizing that acid with milk and cream given once an hour, and then giving baking
soda allowed patients to heal from all of this.
This milk alkali therapy became the way to treat ulcers.
But very quickly, doctors realized that doing this was toxic in humans because of the Hypercalcemia
from the milk and the alkalemia, alkaline, opposite of an acid, presence in blood from
the baking soda.
Milk alkali syndrome decreased in incidence throughout the 1970s because we had newer
medicines that could better control how the stomach produces acid.
But what’s forgotten becomes new again, as more recently in the 2010’s, people are
more often self medicating for various stomach ailments with over the counter calcium carbonate.
Which is fine, but don’t take more than what the label says, because Hypercalcemia
can happen quickly, and these are not candy, no matter how good they taste.
If JT’s problem is all caused by Hypercalcemia, there isn’t a way to suck the calcium directly
out of her blood.
The only real route out, is through the kidneys.
If they’re shutting down, the only way to do this now is to rehydrate her and get water
flowing back through her kidneys.
Additional medicines were given to force her kidneys to excrete calcium in the urine, as her blood
calcium levels started to decrease over days.
As JT regains consciousness, she’s confused because she has no idea why she’s in the
hospital.
When the doctors walk in to her room to talk to her, they ask her what she knows about
eating antacids, and her eyes immediately light up as she explains that those gummies
saved her from the ulcer and enabled her to eat all the foods she loved.
She didn’t realize that eating them like candy is the reason why she’s in the hospital
in the first place.
At discharge, doctors were able to warn her the life threatening dangers of eating more
than just a couple gummy antacids.
They were able to advise her on non-excessive stomach ulcer treatment.
But with a severe episode of hypercalcemia like this, after eating 108 gummy antacids
for breakfast, her permanent kidney damage put her on dialysis as she could not make
a recovery.
Thanks so much for watching.
Take care of yourself.
And be well.