A 36-year-old man living in Longhua District, Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, southern China, had been drinking heavily due to business entertainment and other reasons, and recently began to develop symptoms such as shortness of breath, nausea, and yellowing of the skin. When he went to the hospital and had his arterial blood drawn, it was a deep green color. For nearly the past year, Chen had been drinking more than 500 milliliters of baijiu (a traditional Chinese distilled alcoholic beverage) almost every day for business entertainment purposes. About two weeks ago, he began feeling weak and losing his appetite, and the whites of his eyes started to turn yellow. Recently, my skin has turned yellow and I have also developed symptoms such as vomiting and shortness of breath, so I went to Shenzhen Longhua District People’s Hospital for a checkup. The doctor who examined Chen was Jiang Chunmei, head doctor of the infectious diseases department, and a urine test revealed that Chen’s urine was strongly positive for ketone bodies. Although Chen had never been diagnosed with diabetes, he was suspected of having diabetic ketoacidosis, an extremely dangerous acute complication of diabetes. When his blood was drawn, it was already green and milky, and liver function tests showed that his total bilirubin was 227 micromoles per liter and his triglycerides were 17.8 mmoles, both of which were about 10 times the normal level. Chen was eventually diagnosed with acute viral hepatitis, alcoholic liver disease, diabetic ketoacidosis and hyperlipidemia. Green, milky blood is the result of serious liver damage caused by long-term drinking and hyperlipidemia caused by overeating and drinking. What’s even more frightening is that Chen had diabetes all this time and was unaware. Chen’s blood was so viscous that it could have clogged his blood vessels or stopped flowing, potentially causing a myocardial infarction, cerebral infarction, or acute pancreatitis. The doctors ultimately decided to perform a blood exchange using double filtration plasmapheresis (DFPP). Compared to conventional plasma exchange (PE), DFPP involves filtering separated plasma in two stages to remove pathogenic substances and return clean plasma to the patient’s body. The advantage of this treatment is that it does not require the patient to be transfused with large amounts of plasma. While filtering the plasma, Chen was surprised to see about half a pile of yellow oil floating in the plasma separator, and said, “I will never harm my body by overeating again.” After about two weeks of treatment, Chen finally recovered and was discharged from the hospital. Before being discharged from the hospital, Chen reportedly signed a pledge to his doctor stating that he would never drink alcohol again. image.
>>11 I vomited blood when I was drinking too, but I’m still drinking now. Apparently the ammonia in my body reached my brain. I still have memory problems.
I’ve often seen green liquid spurting out when the arms of monsters or villains are torn off in Ultraman or Kamen Rider, but I never thought that someone like that would actually exist in real life.
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