Patient Eats Toxic Chemical, Emits Hazardous Gas In Hospital
Absent other information, the referred to ‘rodent poison’ is probably a superwarfarin. It’s like regular people-coumadin, but superconcentrated. It kills rodentia by causing them to bleed to death.
Which makes the ‘gas effect’ seem really odd, but possibly explainable.
A patient who apparently ingested rodent poison and is emitting potentially harmful gasses has created a hazardous material situation at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor.
The man is isolated in his room in the medical intensive care unit on the hospital’s sixth floor, 5301 McAuley at East Huron River Drive, hospital spokeswoman Lauren Jones said this afternoon.
Two thoughts: 1) I sincerely hope this patient recovers, and 2) if this is just upper GI bleed smell someones’ going to have rotten egg smell on their face.
I looked up superwarfarins, found a couple of interesting case reports, but none that talk about abnormal gases.
(For the uninitiated, the smell of digested blood is amazingly awful. It’ll make experienced, hard ED staff retch). I can understand why the smell would set off alarms, except that it’s not that uncommon, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
It’ll be interesting to see what come of this.
Lighting matches in the hospital is a nono, by the way.
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
