Beware, lover of spicy foods because this ghost pepper might actually be hot enough to kill you. The latest in this so-called ghost pepper challenge almost killed a man by causing a hole in his esophagus.
Can you handle certain spices that come from the Caribbean or from India? At times some can and at others, you may want to reach for a glass of milk. According to an old wives tale, that helps soothe down the spiciness. Anyway, there’s a challenge that’s not so new on the streets and it’s pretty dominate on YouTube. In addition, it’s pretty stupid and it’s called “ghost pepper challenge.”
Now this man, took the challenge and it nearly killed him because the spice was so hot that it caused him to almost get a hole in his esophagus.
Recently, a 47-year-old man who showed up at a San Francisco emergency room perfectly demonstrated that fact.
A ghost pepper challenge — people do this sort of thing on YouTube frequently — left him with a hole in his esophagus. That injury could have killed him, but luckily he received treatment first.
Ghost peppers, or Bhut Jolokia, reliably come in near the top of rankings of the hottest, most-painful to consume chilies in the world. (They’ve been surpassed on the Scoville scale, a measure of the “heat” brought by these carefully cultivated instruments of pain, by several others, including the Naga Viper, Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, and Carolina Reaper.)
Before arriving at the hospital, the patient had been “at a local restaurant featuring a hamburger topped with ghost pepper puree as part of an eating contest,” according to a case report published in the journal Clinical Communications by University of California–San Francisco emergency department personnel.
Perhaps this man said he really loved spicy food but had no idea what he was in for. In fact, there’s so much more. The details of what happened to him at the hospital may make you stop walking around with hot sauce in your bag. I’m looking at you, Hilary Clinton.
Six glasses of water had done nothing for his pain, unsurprisingly. A medically administered “gastrointestinal cocktail” also failed to alleviate his symptoms, including a heart rate of 106 beats per minute. The doctors write that he continued to grow more and more hypoxic, meaning that not enough oxygen was reaching his organs.
They took him into surgery to put a tube into his chest and collected fluid containing “hamburger, onions, and other green vomitus material,” and at the same time, they noticed an esophagal tear just about one inch long. In total, he required three chest tubes and one gastric tube before he began to recover.
The chest tubes were removed after 14 days and he began to be able to tolerate fluids on day 17. After 23 days, the patient was able to leave the hospital, though he he still needed to eat through the gastric tube.
The spontaneous rupture in the esophagus that the patient experienced is known as Boerhaave syndrome, caused by trauma from vomiting. With treatment, 20 to 40% of Boerhaave patients die. Without that treatment, mortality rates approach 100%, according to the case report.
I will gladly pass up on that spice any day this week. One can only imagine the amount of pain his chest was under.