Web Video / Chubbyemu

"A troper posted a caption. This is what happened to their article."

"-Emia, meaning presence in blood."

— Bernard Hsu, at least once an episode.

Chubbyemu is the name of a YouTube channel operated by Dr. Bernard Hsu, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. Active since 2015, his channel initially focused more on let's plays, product reviews, and rants. However, on Aug 7, 2017, he posted the video "A Mom Drank 3 Gallons Water In 2 Hours. This is What Happened to Her Brain", which would go on to receive 8.2 million views. Since then, his videos have shifted to analyzing case reports of people suffering medical emergencies under bizarre circumstances, usually related to someone consuming something they shouldn't, deliberately misusing medicine with dire consequences, suffering from serious bad luck with infections and other conditions, or consuming too much of something innocuous.

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“CE is an article, presenting to the emergency room with Hypertropemia: high trope presence in blood.”:

• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Played straight, then inverted with a case of lack-of-alcohol-induced-idiocy in the case of Patient AW in "A Dad Mistakenly Drank A Lava Lamp At Bedtime. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys.". A habitual alcoholic, AW attacked his family in a drunken haze, but after coming to, realised to his horror about what he had done, and vowed to never drink again, a well-meaning but extremely bad idea, as he then suffered from delirium tremens, a particularly nasty symptom of alcohol withdrawal that results in a delirious mental state and and an uncontrollable sensation of insects crawling under the skin. In an alcohol-deprived hellscape, AW desperately looked for anything he could find that could take away the pain, and deliriously downed the contents of a lava lamp on his bedside table, ingesting a vast amount of ethylene glycol. The glycol was metabolised by his body into oxalic acid, which then reacted with calcium in his blood to form insoluble calcium oxalate crystals that wreaked havoc on his kidneys.
• And I Must Scream: Demonstrated extensively through the episode detailing the case of Karen Wetterhahn, who, after an unfortunate encounter with dimethylmercury, suffered an agonizing decline as the mercury compound and its metabolites slowly destroyed her brain, her consciousness being reduced to nothing but 'someone inside', 'trapped in a prison of their own comatose body'.
• Anime Hair: As a result of hairdressers closing in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bernard himself sported this and acknowledged it in the comments.
• Anonymous Ringer: Most episodes are based on real incidents, sometimes combined from more than one, though in both cases, patients have their names abbreviated per standard operating procedure for preserving anonymity. In addition, there have been a handful of episodes which take a real and famous case and fictionalise it; one episode is a fictionalised account of the life and death of Ron "Pigpen" McKernan of The Grateful Dead, envisioning how the liver disease that killed him in 1973 might have been curable if it had occurred in the late 2010s. Another is a modernized account of a "Mr. Brittan" who died after inhaling arsenic gas in 1841, explaining how he might have survived if modern medical treatments had existed in his day.
• Badass Boast: Patient BG, who ate 25 laxative-spiked brownies in “A Boy Ate 25 Laxative Brownies In 1 Hour. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys.”, probably intended this to be an end result of said brownie consumption, where his desire to show up his friends meant he continued eating the tampered food even after it became clear he had won the contest to last the longest without needing to use the bathroom, but it resulted in him doing quite significant damage to his muscles and kidneys by creating hyperkalemia that then resulted in rhabdomyolysis, though he managed to survive.
• Based on a Great Big Lie:
  • "A Man Cooked Chicken In Nighttime Flu Medicine. This Is What Happened To His Liver" is Bernard's response to an FDA warning about a supposed viral trend of people sautéing chicken breasts in Nyquil, presenting a hypothetical scenario of what would likely happen because he couldn't find any actual documented instances of people doing such a thing.
  • "A Dad Ate 25 Packs Silica Gel For Breakfast. This Is What Happened To His Stomach" is based on a One Giant Hand strip from 2019.
• Berserk Button: It's a subtle one, but Bernard raises his voice slightly when discussing "colon cleanses", where victims end up suffering brain damage brought on by hypernatremia after reading online disinformation on doing soy sauce cleanses.
• Big Eater:
  • Patient KT, a teenage girl, engages in bouts of nyctophagia (sleepwalking, then eating while still asleep) as a consequence of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes.
  • Patient PB, an American professor living in Vietnam indulges on salmon, but his tendency to eat too fast and not chew his food properly results in quite a painful and dangerous brush with infection. A fish bone penetrated through his digestive system before ripping into his liver, creating bacteria-filled abscesses after depositing some of the mouth flora it was carrying, then re-entered the small intestine from the outside and lodged into the pancreas.
  • Patient VP, a construction worker who had been addicted to heroin a few years earlier, got himself clean of drugs, then switched his indulgences to sugar, and then on to licorice. In the weeks before the incident that would ultimately claim his life, he began gorging on whole bags of real licorice, which is quite hard to get hold of in America, as most candy advertised as licorice in the USA doesn't actually contain the stuff, but instead is merely licorice-flavored. One day, while feasting on yet another packet of licorice (2 pounds of it, to be exact), he collapsed and suffered a heart attack due to the build up of Glycyrrhetinic acid, aka Enoxolone— the metabolite of the licorice's active ingredient, Glycyrrhizinic acid— which behaves similar to the human hormones Aldosterone and Cortisol, causing a steadily worsening case of Hypokalemia (low potassium levels) that ended up making his heart quiver in place uselessly, before stopping altogether. Because no one found the patient in the 30 minutes his heart had been stopped, he suffered critical brain damage that eventually killed him, despite the efforts of doctors in resolving the Glycyrrhetinic acid overdose.
  • Patient MJ, a homeless mother who had been regularly skipping meals to save food for her children, suddenly devours a donation of 40 cookies from a local bakery, causing her organs to shut down from refeeding syndrome.
  • Patient KC gets into a world of hurt after she decides to gorge on 23 bananas after fasting for over a week, creating a spike of insulin that depletes her blood of the potassium and phosphate it needs for the body to function properly. 23 bananas weighs about 10 lbs, or 4.5 kg, making this example especially unusual!
  • Patient BT is a mukbanger, so big eating comes with the territory - but after reading one too many articles about the health benefits of pickles, she decides that they are healthy in general regardless of how much she consumes. BT then devours a gallon of pickles and chugs the juice, which gives her hypernatremia.
  • Because Patient JT had such a fondness for spicy foods, she managed to eat her way to developing a crippling stomach ulcer. Due to prescribed antibiotics causing her significant discomfort and personality changes, she weans herself off medication and instead manages her pain with antacids. Upon discovering gummy antacids, she quickly goes from eating them with breakfast to eating them exclusively for breakfast, ending with a breakfast of 108 gummies that puts her in the emergency room from hypercalcemia and kidney failure.
  • Patient GF completes a challenge to finish 8 pounds of beef in a burger in 30 minutes, resulting in a large quantity of meat getting stuck in his stomach and stretching it, thus causing his pancreas to start digesting itself and his kidneys to start failing as the stomach presses against his internal organs, unable to move the large quantity of meat. While GF does manage to eventually pass the gigantic quantity of ground beef, he comes very close to losing his life due to the impending organ failure. Dr. Bernard also uses the example to illustrate potential complications that may come as a result of competitive eaters straining their stomach as a result, since there isn't sufficient medical literature on the long-term effects of competitive eating on the body. Additionally, some fascinating medical scans are shown of competitive eaters to demonstrate how with the training they carry out, their stomachs behave in ways that aren't normally seen with people who don't participate in the sport to hold amounts of food much larger than the amount Patient GF ate.
• Bittersweet Ending: Any case where the patient only makes a recovery instead of a complete one; they survived, but will probably be physically affected by the incident for the rest of their life.
• Body Horror:
  • Patient BB, who drank the liquid in a snowglobe in alcohol withdrawal-induced desperation, then collapsed to the ground and was left there for two days by his ignorant son who cared more about playing his video games than going to see if his father needed help. The ethylene glycol in the liquid he drunk was processed into oxalic acid, which then reacted with calcium in his blood to form calcium oxalate crystals, which in turn started tearing apart the nephrons in his kidneys.
  • Patient CC, who had been unknowingly infected with HIV through contaminated blood transfusions decades prior, regularly enjoyed eating left over cookie dough from her weekly baking sessions for her family. As a result of her drastically weakened immune system, a salmonella infection made it all the way to the site of an old fracture in her leg, weakening it until one day the bone spontaneously snapped.
  • Patient GB, who decided it would be a clever idea to (very poorly) boil up some suspicious magic mushrooms he bought off the deep web, then inject the lot into his veins. Not only did he get a nasty brush with cyanide poisoning from the stock that may well have been contaminated deliberately by the seller, but the real body horror comes in the form of dual bacteremia and fungemia, the former from a common soil bacterial species, Brevibacillus, but the latter from the very mushroom species as the one he thought he could trip from injecting; the patient had mushroom cells growing inside his bloodstream!
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Taken to a shocking extreme with Patient BW, whose genetics made him a natural lightweight; this came back to haunt him in the worst possible way after he decided to take his Purple Drank with antibiotics he was taking to treat a sore throat. With the part of his liver that would normally process some of the codeine in the syrup into inactive norcodeine blocked by processing the antibiotics, levels of morphine in his body reached a critical point where his brain was unable to send signals to control his breathing and heart past his brainstem, resulting in BW undergoing cardiac arrest and severe brain damage that cost him his hearing in one ear and affected his sight as well. Ultimately, it was not the brain damage that killed him, but rather a later overdose on loperamide in an attempt to self-medicate his opioid withdrawal symptoms, after his friend suggested he try it instead of seeking medical attention.
• The Comically Serious:
  • Bernard has a knack for letting unusually casual dialogue slip through his medical analyses without changing his tone of voice or expression, with the juxtaposition providing the humor, and is also very adept at sneaking the occasional meme in, either as a brief visual gag or in dialogue. For example, he describes one of Patient JC's hallucinations as follows:
  Dr. Bernard: Her ceiling became like Jell-O, wobbling around. "But ceilings are cringe. I'm floor gang now!", she thought. "Always have been."
  • He describes some teens who unwisely ate lots of laxative-spiked cookies because they were playing a challenge called "First to Poo-poo wears a Tutu". As ridiculous as that phrase name is, Dr Bernard does not smirk or lose composure at all, which only makes the phrase even more comedic.
  • Perhaps the best example yet comes from the Nyquil chicken video. As the case is purely hypothetical (unlike most on his channel), Dr. Bernard has no compunctions with going whole hog on the memes and jokes, up to and including naming the patient "OP". Of course, the entire video is presented in his usual composed tone.
• Conspiracy Theorist: 33 year old "KC" was likely one of these. Tired of going nowhere with his career despite his best efforts, with warning labels and advertisements only compounding his hatred of big corporations, he one day decides to munch on 25 packets full of silica gel like a bowl of cereal simply to spite whatever company printed "DO NOT EAT" on the packets. He also was fully expecting to "escape the simulation", as he put it to medical staff.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The unluckier patients offten suffer these.
• Delayed Diagnosis:
  • Patient HC ends up on the receiving end of this after he experiences a persistent cough and blood in his urine, and checks himself into the hospital. Although the emergency room staff suspect kidney cancer due to HC's sickle cell trait, HC gets transferred to another doctor in another hospital who claims that HC has an HIV infection, despite not even bothering to run a test for it. Luckily for HC, a chance reaching out to Dr. Nizar Tannir not only gets him a proper diagnosis of his renal medullary carcinoma, but also the chemotherapy and clinical trial treatment he needs, in spite of HC's lack of health insurance.
  • Patient KJ suffers from this throughout her life as a result of her mother, peers, and doctors largely downplaying various symptoms she experiences during childhood. By the time she's an adult, she finally gets a proper diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus. Tragically, the sheer delay means that the autoimmune disease has already been ravaging her body for years, and after her symptoms resurface following years of medication, she decides she's had enough and opts to self-medicate.
• Disaster Dominoes: Many of the cases featured are the end result of a chain of events taking place in the body that end in disaster, and most conditions shown are not caused by a single incident alone, but rather a cascading sequence of interactions and incidents that usually end in the patient being hospitalized at the very least.
• Do Not Try This at Home: Several videos, particularly the ones involving TikTokers consuming dangerous quantities of substances ranging from nutmeg spice to over-the-counter medication, use a clip of Bernard firmly telling viewers "Don't... do it!" in the introduction.
• Downer Beginning: "DC is a 25-year-old man, presenting to the emergency room...dead on arrival."
• Downer Ending:
  • Patient KC discovers a suspect lesion on his right arm and cuts it out with a knife, rather than seeking medical attention. The lesion turns out to be an extremely malignant melanoma, which had likely already begun to spread before his self-surgery, and multiple metastatic tumors in his brain kill him before he can begin any treatment.
  • Patient KG suffered a perfect storm of genetic abnormalities that his attempting to push the boundaries of safe exercise led to him developing cancer in his kidneys.
  • Patient BW also suffered a perfect storm of genetic abnormalities that not only made him more susceptible to the ill effects of cough syrup abuse, but also suffer debilitating, and ultimately fatal, heart problems when he attempted to self-medicate to treat his withdrawal symptoms.
  • Patient DC never recovered from the brain injury brought on by lack of oxygen.
  • Patient OP destroys his liver by way of a massive acetaminophen (aka Paracetamol) overdose, and as no transplant was available in time, he died as a result of acute liver failure.
  • Patient VP ends up dying 32 hours after admission due to massive brain damage.
  • Patient AC suffers a horrific Cruel and Unusual Death when fungus in rotten coconut milk causes his brain to ooze out of his skull.
  • Patient JC accidentally injects himself with a massive overdose of bovine antibiotic after being kicked by a cow, going into a fatal cardiac arrest after appearing to stabilize.
  • Patient GW mistakenly drinks mislabeled diquat herbicide and subsequently experiences a catastrophic domino effect of organ failure. The worst part: there is absolutely no antidote for this kind of poisoning, and GW is made aware of this and told to make arrangements with his family even before the symptoms start to set in.
  • Patient RB is caught having an affair, and his wife responds by poisoning him over a long period of time with the heavy metal thallium. By the time he realizes what's going on, the damage to his system is too severe, and he suffers a fatal cardiac arrest while being given dialysis. The one bright spot is that, using what little time he had left, he deduced and confided to his sister that his wife had poisoned him, just before he became unresponsive. As a result, she is arrested and ultimately convicted of his murder.
  • Patient PT, after an affair, realizes he's contracted an STD and, rather than telling the truth to medical professionals and thus his wife, decides to self-medicate by applying paraquat herbicide directly to his crotch over a substantial period of time, causing an effect as though he had ingested a massive overdose of it by mouth. Despite the efforts of the emergency staff, he dies of cardiac arrest during treatment.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Chubbyemu started out as a gaming channel, occasionally dabbling in commentary, tech and personal health (his first video to blow up was of him celebrating his weight loss).
• Eating Contest: A group of young teenagers try a challenge they dubbed "First to Poo-poo wears a Tutu", where they tried to eat laxative-spiked brownies and last the longest without needing to use the bathroom. The victor gloated about his win and kept eating the brownies even after he won, and let's just say the results weren't pretty... but not in the way you might expect.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Katie, a nurse at the hospital Patient JC was admitted to for an appendectomy in "A Student Felt A Sharp Pain In Her Side. This Is How Her Organs Shut Down." happened to be tending to her father, who was suffering from an MRSA infection. Because Katie repeatedly forgot to clean her hands after handling her father, she contaminated numerous objects at the nurse's station, resulting in the staff unintentionally infecting JC with MRSA, which nearly killed her through sepsis. With this amount of negligence at play, it's a miracle no one else was infected with the bacteria.
  • Patient JC's flagrant disregard for food hygiene comes back to bite her in the ass in "A Woman Ate A Suspicious Burger For Dinner. This Is What Happened To Her Kidneys." when she knowingly neglects to properly clean the Romaine lettuce used for the burgers she would regularly leave until cold and slowly eat throughout the day, allowing the Shigatoxin-producing E. coli strain OH157:E7 free reign to wreck the inner lining of her intestines using the toxin, then send it to the kidneys where it thoroughly trashes them too, resulting in a duel-pronged assault on her body that ends in haemolytic anaemia and acute kidney injury.
• Flanderization: Of a sort, though it's downplayed, given that all the cases featured on the series are real, or at least are directly Based on a True Story. While earlier episodes in the series predominantly focused on genuine mistakes or unexpected incidents, a selection of the more recent episodes deal with patent stupidity or irrational madness instead.
• The Food Poisoning Incident:
  • Botulism from gas station nachos, which got a large number of people sick.
  • Parasites from pork tacos sold by an illegal food truck.
  • A grandmother who repeatedly gave herself salmonella from eating raw cookie dough, which was made worse by her unknowingly being HIV-positive.
  • A man who tragically died from consuming a small amount of water from an expired coconut that was infested with a highly toxic fungus.
  • A woman who got an E. coli infection from lettuce in a burger, which was probably made worse by her habit of forgetting about her food, then eating it when it had cooled to room temperature, an environment ideal for bacteria that cause illness to grow in.
  • Leftover chicken and noodles that gave an unlucky young man an infection that caused him to lose several body parts.
  • More than one video has covered people who got sick from old or poorly prepared sushi.
  • Another botulism incident starts with a prisoner who ate an old potato that was being saved for making illegal prison wine. The same prison wine also caused several other prisoners who drank it to also get sick with botulism.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Unfortunately averted in the case of Patient BG's brother, Nate, who agreed to purchase the laxatives to be used to spike the brownies that BG and his friends planned on challenging each other to eat, and BG's sister, who happily agreed to cook up the questionable food for the participants to eat. Neither sibling considered questioning whether BG was in the right frame of mind, nor did they ever consider that what they were doing was enabling someone who clearly had no idea what they were getting into to do something extremely dangerous. Fortunately, Nate was able to tell doctors everything about what happened before BG was admitted to hospital, providing vital information that was used to save BG's life.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In some of the more recent videos, the phrase "Powerhouse of the Cell" or some variant thereof appears for a single frame when the case being described mentions Mitochondria.
  • At the end of the video for Patient JA, who overdosed on pre-workout supplement powder, the actor for JA raises a packet of silica gel from a bottle of supplement for the camera. A message briefly appears, asking "What if it was all just part of the simulation?" in reference to Patient KC, mentioned in the Conspiracy Theorist entry above.
• Gargle Blaster: Patient PD helped some of his inmates collect food scraps, particularly fruits and potatoes, to make into "pruno" — a crude wine made from fermenting said food scraps in a garbage bag filled with hot water.
• Girls with Moustaches: Patient KT, a teenage girl, grew a beard as a result of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.
• Gratuitous Latin / Gratuitous Greek: Par for the course with this being a medical series; plenty of medical conditions are given their technical names, with Bernard providing etymology explanations on what they mean.
• Groin Attack:
  • Patient CC, ridden with sexual thoughts he couldn't stand, decided to castrate himself by injecting himself in the testicles with calcium chloride from a cheese-making kit. Naturally, this did an absolute number to his genitalia; between the calcium chloride constricting the veins and triggering cell death, and the sudden influx of calcium creating large masses of calcium phosphate, he succeeded in rendering his testicles useless, at the cost of agonizing pain. All of this could have been avoided if he simply opted to choose psychotherapy or medication to manage his intrusive thoughts.
  • Patient PT attempted to self-medicate an STD he caught after a one-night stand by dousing his groin with paraquat, even wearing a diaper to prevent it from evaporating. Unfortunately, scrotal skin is significantly thinner and more absorbent than other areas of the body, so over time he absorbed so much of the herbicide that it was as if he had just drank it instead. Ultimately the paraquat built up in his lungs, destroying them and sealing his fate.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Shots of people eating tend to be taken zoomed in on the subject's mouth, allowing for things like the muscular movements of the cheeks, spots on the skin and the occasional wayward crumb to be shown in intricate detail.
• Guest Star:
  • Justin Whang, host of Tales From the Internet, has had two starring roles in the series, appearing in the reconstructions for the episodes "A Dad Drank 50 Beers Everyday For 6 Weeks. This Is What Happened To His Brain. and "A TikToker Drank 1 Liter Cough Syrup. This Is What Happened To His Brain." as Patient JW and BW, respectively.
  • Fellow YouTuber East Bound stars as Patient CE to discuss his own medical case on the horrifying side effects of the chemical 2,4-Dinitrophenol in A Man Had An Accident With A Weight Loss Chemical. This Is What Happened To His Organs.
  • Several episodes feature interviews with doctors and medical practitioners giving their perspectives on symptoms and illnesses. In particular, Dr. Pavlos Msaouel has featured twice on the channel to discuss sickle cell trait and renal medullar carcinoma.
  • At the end of A Man Found Blood in His Urine. This Is What Happened To His Kidney., the featured patient HC makes an appearance at the end, declaring, "My name is Herman Connor. And I'm an RMC survivor."
  • Justin Silverman of Cinemassacre Video portrays Patient JS in "A Gamer Drank 12 Energy Drinks In 10 Minutes. This Is What Happened To His Organs."
  • Patient GF in A Man Ate 8 Pound Burger In 30 Minutes. This Is What Happened To His Organs. is played by Guga Foods, whose channel focuses on preparing steaks and other meats in various ways. In a collaboration, Dr. Bernard - himself a self-professed fan of Guga Foods for several years - also joined Guga on a video where Guga dry-aged steaks with fresh and black garlic.
• Halloween Episode: A Man Drank 6 Glowsticks For Dinner. This Is What Happened To His Stomach. Dr. Bernard mentions that one common cause of accidental glowstick ingestion is kids drinking the liquid during Halloween and Independence Day.
• I Ate WHAT?!:
  • Patient GW was in the habit of storing leftover herbicides in sports-drink containers. This is a terrible idea that any herbicide bottle will tell you not to do, and for the exact reason that happened to GW - he mixed up which bottle was herbicide and which was Gatorade and accidentally swallowed a fair amount of diquat dibromide. By the time he arrived at the emergency room, the herbicide was in his blood, destroying his organs one after another. Sadly, he did not survive.
  • Patient PD ate a two-week-old potato that had been hidden in his prison cell for the purpose of making crude wine known colloquially as "pruno", and wound up developing worsening paralysis. While eating a potato that old is always ill-advised, it turns out this potato came from a whole batch of potatoes that carried botulinum toxin, and as a result, PD developed botulism, along with several other prisoners who ate potatoes or drank "pruno" made with the potatoes from the tainted batch.
• Infection Scene: The first act of each video after the introduction details how each patient got to the emergency room, elaborating on the actions they took before falling ill.
• Instant Illness:
  • Patient TB eats some suspicious leftover sushi from the skip at his local gas station and gets infected by the nematode parasite Anisakis simplex and immediately begins feeling pain in his stomach as the worm gets to work infesting his digestive system.
  • Patient AW, after downing an entire lava lamp during a particularly bad case of delirium tremens from his alcohol withdrawal, immediately feels his stomach churning after drinking the contents, which contain the dangerous chemical ethylene glycol. Unfortunately, he's still too delirious to do anything about it, causing the glycol to be metabolised into oxalic acid that then produces hundreds of tiny calcium oxalate crystals that damage his kidneys.
  • Patient AC goes from being alive and healthy, to in grave condition with multiple organ failure, to dead in the span of just over a full day after drinking a small amount of spoilt coconut milk that contained the fungus Arthrinium saccharicola and the mitochondrial toxin 3-nitropropionic acid. This latter chemical behaves like cyanide, and the tiny amount he did swallow contained enough to knock out his mitochondria's ability to produce ATP for energy, resulting in his organ systems failing one by one and ending with his brain oozing out of the sutures in his skull, effectively crushing itself to death and finally killing him.
  • Taken to a truly horrifying extreme with Patient GW, who after accidentally swallowing diquat dibromide and almost immediately feeling an agonising pain radiating through his body, has barely enough time to make it to the hospital, give the doctors his advance directive, call his family to his side and say goodbye to them - in case he never wakes up again - and is then promptly put into a medically-induced coma as the chemical begins to destroy every single system in his body by preventing respiration from being carried out. Within 24 hours, most of his organs have sustained critical damage and are non-functional. Within a week, he's dead.
• It's Probably Nothing: A number of patients and their families shrug off the early warning signs and symptoms, assuming it's not anything serious and will probably go away before long.
• Just One More Level!: "A Man Played Video Games Nonstop For 73 Hours. This Is What Happened To His Organs". Patient DC was so obsessed with video games that he couldn't stop playing for 73 hours on a weekend. This stops his heart thanks to deep vein thrombosis (blood clot) developed from sitting down for this long, which then clogged his pulmonary artery, eventually leading to permanent brain death thanks to lack of oxygen.
• Karma Houdini
  • Patient BW's friend, who - even in spite of knowing that BW had a problem with drugs and had already inflicted irreversible damage to his brain by overdosing on lean - never faces any consequences for telling him to overdose on Loperamide to reverse his withdrawal symptoms, even though this directly leads to BW's death.
  • Patient HB's mother seemingly gets away with trying to poison her son with a melatonin megadose by sneaking gummy supplements into his bag of candy because she couldn't be bothered to try to assist her son in seeking help for his ADHD.
  • Patient PB's wife in "A Wife Put Drain Cleaner In Husband's Coffee. This Is What Happened To His Stomach." quite literally gets away with (attempted) murder after trying to kill her husband several times by pouring drain cleaner into his coffee, thanks to a medical mistake that resulted in doctors failing to discover chemical burns on the inside of his oesophagus and stomach, instead attributing his poor condition to his stomach ulcers. The episode ends with the couple resolving to divorce, but it's left unclear as to whether she ever faced legal consequences for quite blatantly deciding murder was the more logical option for her.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Patient RJ's tendency to behave like a dick by arguing with and showing up his friends in "A Man Drank Throat Numbing Spray While Eating Spicy Food. This Is What Happened To His Brain." immediately backfires when he decides to intentionally misuse a throat-numbing spray that contains the local anaesthetic Benzocaine to avoid losing a challenge to eat increasingly spicy food - he decides to swallow a huge amount of the medicine to avoid giving the game away when he accidentally pours it into his mouth, causing him to suffer from methemoglobinemia. While the others laugh at his expense when they find out what he had been trying to do, they at least have the decency to bring him to the hospital when they realise he could be in big trouble... which is probably something he wouldn't have done if anyone else had been the unfortunate victim of such an overdose.
• Media Scaremongering: Defied. If a video title reads like a Clickbait Gag that makes it seem as if one would get a terminal disease from doing incredibly common, mundane tasks, Dr. Bernard will immediately try to assuage the viewer's fears right at the start of the video. For example...
  • "A Student Ate Suspicious Leftovers For Lunch. This Is What Happened To His Limbs." opens with Dr. Bernard emphasizing that the case reviewed in the episode was a freak accident, and not a general cause of leftovers.
  • In "A Boy Put On A Pair Of Socks. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys.", he opens with this:
  Dr. Bernard: There's two known species of spiders with venomous bites in the United States. For both species, a bite leading to severe systemic illness is rare. Let me say that again — systemic illness from a spider bite in the United States is rare. This video is to teach about the medical side of cases like this. It's not about scaring people on spiders.
• Medication Tampering: Patient GB in A Man Microdosed Dark Web Bought Mushrooms. This Is What Happened To His Organs ordered psilocybin mushrooms on the Dark Web to self-medicate his self-diagnosed depression with. Unbeknownst to GB, the mushrooms had been doused in deadly cyanide by the seller, and the Mushroom Samba that ensued after injecting the mushrooms was actually GB suffocating from the cyanide, somehow tricking himself into believing he was tripping from a combination of low oxygen and wanting to believe his incorrect method of administration was working.
• Mega Meal Challenge: "A Man Ate 8 Pound Burger In 30 Minutes. This Is What Happened To His Organs." opens with a man with a fondness of burgers taking on an eight-pound hamburger challenge. Unfortunately for him, the body is simply not equipped for taking in eight pounds of beef in only thirty minutes, leading to his stomach being stretched to the point of his other organs being crushed.
• Mushroom Samba:
  • Patient JC's Benadryl overdose caused her to experience one of these before collapsing.
  • Patient GB somehow manages to fool himself into thinking he's experiencing one of these after injecting the 'mushroom tea' he made because he couldn't be bothered to wait 20 minutes or so for his magic mushrooms to kick in. He wasn't tripping at all, but instead suffocating on the cyanide deliberately poured over the shady mushrooms by the seller on the dark web, whilst simultaneously getting infected with Brevibacillus brevis and cells from the very mushrooms he had injected himself with.
• My God, You Are Serious!:
  • In "An Athlete Squatted 500 Reps In 20 Minutes. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys.", Patient KG, an athlete recovering from depression and suffering from sickle cell trait completely overdid it and attempted 500 reps in the span of 20 minutes. Over time, he began gradually getting weaker and weaker, then fell to the ground and started seizing; his friends somehow kept assuming it was a joke until they noticed he was unconscious and convulsing on the floor.
  • Patient JC's husband in "A Mom Tried Keto Diet For 30 Days. This Is What Happened When Things Went Wrong." initially kept dismissing his wife's increasingly strange behaviour (ultimately caused by an insulinoma in her pancreas releasing inappropriate amounts of insulin, inducing hypoglycaemia that was exacerbated by her attempt at following a Keto diet) as jokes, even when she put their daughter in the fridge in a glucose-deprived haze.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Dr. Bernard's doctorate is in pharmacy, not medicine. However, his specialty is in toxicology.
• Once per Episode: Chubbyemu will often mention how "-emia" means "presence in blood", whenever the patient has a blood condition as a result of their malady. This even extends to episodes where the patient doesn't get a blood condition, like "A Student Drank 2 Liters Fiber Supplement For Dinner. This Is What Happened To His Intestines.", where the patient suffered from clogged intestines without blood issues, and Chubbyemu mentions about how Psyllium fiber is a generally safe supplement that helps against hypercholesterolemia^note "Hyper", meaning high; "cholesterol", refering of course to cholesterol; and "-emia", meaning presence in blood. High cholesterol presence in blood.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, as patients are generally Only Known by Initials as is commonplace in medical literature (and legally required by HIPAA guidelines if the patient is still alive), the same abbreviation has appeared for multiple people. This extends to the patients' families as well; there's been multiple moms of patients named Karen in the series so far.
• Only Known by Initials: Keeping in line with HIPAA guidelines, patients are exclusively referred to by their first and last initials. This practice is kept even when discussing a deceased patient (e.g. using "KW" when discussing the infamous death of Karen Wetterhahn by diethylene mercury poisoning), which is not required but is nevertheless also commonplace in clinical fields out of force of habit.
• Phlebotinum Overdose: A sizeable number of cases featured on the channel are the result of people taking medicine incorrectly - usually by overdosing on it, or using it for reasons other than to treat an illness - thus showcasing the power modern pharmaceuticals have to cause harm as well as relieve it.
• Poverty Food: Patient GN was forced to adjust his diet due to having fallen victim for a scam that left him with barely enough money for groceries. He was reduced to eating nothing but ramen noodles for six months, eating that many hundred pounds of ramen during that time. That much ramen is not healthy for anyone, but especially for GN due to celiac disease.
• Power Parasite: The Diphyllobothrium latum tapeworm in "A Mom Ate 5 Day Old Sushi For Dinner. This Is What Happened To Her Brain.", who had been living in Patient JC's intestines for months after she ate some out of date sushi, effectively carried out this trope by stealing the Vitamin B12 in the food JC ate, resulting in a variety of neurological problems in its host.
• Product Placement: Most of the over-the-counter medicines and supplements seen in the series bear the labels and branding of CVS Pharmacy.
• Pun: Bernard isn't above the occasional quip, including the classic "Don't take it if it's nacho cheese!" during the conclusion of an episode where a chef ingested nacho cheese and suffered from botulism as a result.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Patient KC in "A Dad Ate 25 Packs Silica Gel For Breakfast. This Is What Happened To His Stomach." reaches his after he sees a packet of silica gel labelled "DO NOT EAT", as this is enough to drive him over the edge after months of increasing adherence to conspiracy theories brought on by frustration and a lack of progression at his workplace. In his mind, he was going to make 'Big Silica Gel' pay, and 'escape the simulation' by... eating silica gel packets with milk like cereal. He very quickly regrets this action.
  • A similar case happens with Patient AC, who gets so angry at his lack of progress at work and the warning instructions on glowsticks, he promptly purchases six glowsticks to drink the colored liquid mixtures inside. He even declares to the admitting nurse that "it was only a matter of time, he was about to re-enter the evolutionary level above human".
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • The cases featured are either adapted from recent medical incidents discussed in the news or other media (the Tide Pod Challenge, Chinese COVID-19 Cases, Choloroquine and Nutmeg Challenge videos being an example of this), those Bernard or his colleagues directly witnessed, or are taken from medical literature. While the names may be changed for abbreviations, all the cases are real, with only minor adaptations made when needed.
  • One episode is dedicated to the toxicology report on George Floyd, who was killed by four police officers in Minneapolis.
• Rule of Three: Patient RJ experiences three key events during his bout of methemoglobinemia brought on by his extremely stupid decision to abuse throat-numbing spray to cheat at a spicy food challenge because of his urge to act like a dick to his friends, all united by the fact that they involved the colour blue. First, the medicine itself happens to be blue, and he spills some of it on his skin, which his friends immediately pick up on. Then, when he runs to the bathroom, his skin turns blue due to cyanosis, as the methemoglobin in his blood can't give up its oxygen, causing organ systems across his body to go into ischemia. Finally, the medicine used to clear up his poisoning is none other than methylene blue, which has a very indicative name given its rich blue colour.
• Running Gag:
  • "(Hypo-/Hyper-) -emia, meaning (high/low) presence of (item) in blood." This shows up freqently in comments like if the video is about the patient drinking a lava lamp, one or more comments will joke about "hyperlavalampemia, hyper meaning high, lavalamp meaning lava lamp, and emia meaning presence in blood: high lava lamp presence in blood!"
  • "A [Person] [carried out action]. This is How His/Her [Organ] Shut Down." - the basic title for most of the videos in the series.
  • Because a lot of medical complications Bernard covers deal with low or high sodium presence in blood and other conditions that involve an osmotic gradient, any time it comes up he will demonstrate sodium's "where it is, water will flow to it" property by using the dissolved sodium tube experiment.
  • If mitochondria are mentioned, you can reasonably predict that "The Mitochondria is the Powerhouse of the Cell" or some variation thereof will appear in the episode in some way, shape or form, be it from Bernard mentioning the line himself, or in the form of a Freeze-Frame Bonus as on-screen text.
  • At least three completely unconnected videos have dealt with cough syrup abuse. One was someone abusing codeine cough syrup as Purple Drank, one was OTC dextromethorphan cough syrup as an inappropriate antidepressant and one was someone overdosing on diphenhydramine syrup for social media views.
• Ruptured Appendix: Patient JC in "A Student Felt A Sharp Pain In Her Side. This Is How Her Organs Shut Down." went to a hospital after she experienced a bout of appendicitis at a student party, but things quickly go from bad to worse after she is infected with the MRSA superbug as a result of extremely poor hygiene practices from one of the staff while she recovers from an appendectomy.
• Self-Surgery: In "A Farmer Removed His Own Skin Cancer With A Pocket Knife. This Is What Happened To His Brain.", Patient KC tried to take care of melanoma, a potentially lethal cancer of the skin, by cutting out the discolored skin with a pocket knife. While he didn't seriously hurt himself, the tumor had already metastasized to his lymph nodes, and eventually, his brain.
• Shown Their Work: Bernard has a doctorate in pharmacy and bachelors in chemical engineering, and it shows. His videos will go into great detail of not just the symptoms of patients, but the exact chemical reactions that lead to them. He even makes sure to provide links to science journals in his video descriptions.
• Sickbed Smuggling: Patient BA ends up in the hospital after drinking several cans of soda on a daily basis, so he secretly calls his wife and asks her to bring more soda to him. Eventually, an intern puts a stop to this.
• Snake Oil Salesman:
  • Crossing over with Conspiracy Theorist, the internet shills in "A Woman Drank 1 Liter Soy Sauce Colon Cleanse In 2 Hours. This Is What Happened To Her Brain." claimed that drinking a liter of soy sauce would cause the body to evacuate all its toxins via the colon and leave it cleansed. Unfortunately, Patient CG, who was already in poor health from a combination of celiac disease and suffering from its associated neurological effects believed the shills, drank as much as she could, and then nearly died from having her organs rapidly shutting down, and her brain dehydrating so much that it began haemorrhaging after she consumed several times the lethal dose of salt from the soy sauce. Doctors tried to correct the sodium levels, and it seemed to work, but they corrected it too quickly, leaving CG paralyzed from central pontine myelinolysis brought on by osmotic demyelination syndrome. In the same episode, Bernard takes a subtle jab at real life snake oil salesman Jillian Mai Thi Epperly, whose 'Jilly Juice' drink (fermented cabbage, boiled water and a dangerous amount of salt) has sickened many of its consumers and has resulted in at least one death.
  • Mentioned in A Woman Drank "35% Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide." This Is What Happened To Her Brain. Specifically, people selling "35% food grade hydrogen peroxide" as alternative medicine, despite the fact that said substance is considered a chemical disinfectant that shouldn’t be ingested, and is no longer used to clean topical cuts as of the early 2000’s, thanks to the advent of gentler antiseptics. While Dr. Bernard acknowledges that grievances against the healthcare system are legitimate, he adds that alternative treatments as in the mentioned case only led to other issues that could have been prevented.
• Sweet Tooth/Must Have Caffeine: Patient BA gets a job at a company where one of the perks is unlimited free soda, and becomes heavily addicted to it, to the point that he drinks a case of soda per day. The sugar and sodium content of his drinks causes a chain reaction of health issues, including muscle breakdown due to potassium deficiency and serious kidney problems.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • Karen, Patient HB's mother in "A Boy Ate 180 Gummy Melatonins For Lunch. This Is What Happened To His Brain.", decides to switch out her hyperactive, gaming-mad teenage son's sweets with gummy melatonin supplements instead of disciplining him or teaching him restraint, opening the packet and pouring the supplements in, mixing them with the sweets. This immediately goes horribly wrong when her son takes the packet and eats all 180 supplements inside, then passes out an hour later from a massive melatonin overdose. Even though she knows she's effectively poisoned her son and is affected by guilt, Karen stays quiet, rationalising that it's not her fault because her son was the one who made the choice to eat the supplements, and that it's his fault for being so loud. When the doctors pressure her, she eventually blurts out that he must have eaten a whole bottle of Melatonin gummies after they somehow got into the bag of candy that she totally didn't open and tamper with. Shockingly, data shown in the video shows that cases like these are becoming more and more common, and the amount of cases of melatonin megadoses both from accidents and parents intentionally feeding their children massive amounts of the medicine are growing in number year on year.
  • Patient PB's wife, dissatisfied with her marriage and her husband's apparent refusal to seek work (when in fact, he had tried, but had given up due to repeated rejection and a growing case of depression) decides that her only option is to slowly and painfully poison him to death, instead of going the legal route. As she repeatedly gave him cups of coffee spiked with drain cleaner, the patient's wife very nearly got away with it (and very nearly killed him, too), as doctors neglected to look any closer until he consumed a large enough amount to cause horrendous gastric bleeding, as the chemical burns on the inside of his stomach and oesophagus were mistaken for stomach ulcers.
  • In an accidental example, albeit one caused by extreme stupidity, Patient NP’s father in "A Girl Mistakenly Ate 96 Gummy Edibles. This Is What Happened To Her Brain." thinks he can get away with buying more THC edibles in the form of gummy candy after already getting told off by his wife by sneaking them into a packet of ordinary candies before placing them back in the cupboard. NP finds the packet with the edibles, eats all 96 of them in one go and gets really, really high, falling down the stairs (ironically, a very similar scenario that got her father in trouble earlier) and sustaining minor injuries, and later has a near-miss with respiratory issues at the hospital. While fortunately the people involved understand it was just an accident, NP and her family’s situation is then investigated by CPS, as doctors must report drug-related incidents involving minors to the relevant authorities.
  • Patient RB's wife in A Husband Was Found With Another Woman. This Is What Was Done To His Organs. discovers that her husband is having an affair, and begins adding thallium sulfate to his food under the belief that it couldn't be easily traced. After a long period of suffering in which RB began experiencing increased hair loss and constant vomiting, he eventually ends up in the emergency room where he begins rapidly losing the feelings in his limbs and, eventually, his life. Unfortunately for RB's wife, Patient RB deduced that she had poisoned him, and warned her sister using what little time he had left before going under at the hospital. Furthermore, the combination of symptoms he experienced was specific enough for the medical team to suspect intentional thallium poisoning, causing them to alert the authorities. Not only does RB's wife plead guilty, Dr. Bernard adds that the case ended up being preserved in medical literature, documenting how the medical team found high concentrations of thallium in RB's cerebrospinal fluid.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Patient KC's read up on refeeding syndrome and how to avoid it, so she should be fine going into progressively longer fasts, right? Up until she becomes so weak after one week long fast, she ends up gorging on 10 pounds of bananas without realizing it.
  • Megan, the mother of Patient BB, switches to using screw bottles to store her essential oils instead of using ones with child safety caps, because the arthritis in her fingers has become too painful for her to use the safer bottles. She believes that as long as she keeps the bottles out of reach of her 3-year-old son, it should be fine — until she gets a sudden work call while making her arthritis medicine and rushes to take it, leaving her oils in range of her son. By the time she's back from her call, her son has already drunk a full bottle of her wintergreen oil, and despite the mess he left behind, she doesn't realize what's happened until her son starts exhibiting fast breathing and vomiting, prompting a visit to the emergency room.
• Toilet Humor: While it's an accurate portrayal of the real events, Patient GF's brush with death from eating eight organ-disrupting pounds of beef ending in several minutes of uninterrupted flatulence followed by a "tremendous bowel movement" and a near-instant discharge has elements of this thanks to the sheer scope of the event and general Mood Whiplash (plus the visible relief in the patient's face).
• The Tooth Hurts:
  • Patient CJ, a man seemingly cursed with bad luck^note In order, his son dies, his wife leaves him, he loses his job, and the rest of his immediate family die one after the other falls into a depression, and - among other things - neglects to brush his teeth for forty days straight. This causes a tooth to become infected, which in turn infects his gums, allowing bacteria from his mouth to enter his blood stream and aggravate his developing Type 2 diabetes, which he triggered by drinking excessive amounts of orange juice (also supplying the bacteria with more than enough sugar that it needed to thrive). Once the offending tooth was pulled and the infection cleaned up with antibiotics, Patient CJ was able to fully recover.
  • Patient BC's poor dental hygiene ends up costing him dearly; after having some of his teeth pulled due to them rotting as a result of a lack of dental care, he receives antibiotics, but these wipe out his intestinal microbiome, so he ends up eating gummy probiotics to restore his normal gut flora. However, he begins binging on the gummies, and, as evidenced by him continuing to taste the sweet flavour of the medicine after eating them, still doesn't brush his teeth. This allows bacteria from the probiotics to get into his bloodstream through the wounds in his mouth and make their way to the heart, where they form a vegetation and damage the heart valves in a condition called infective endocarditis. A fragment of the vegetation breaks off and lodges in the artery supplying blood to the spleen, causing it to start to die and swell up. This, combined with the endocarditis, forced doctors to take immediate action to save BC's life.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Patient TJ, after moving from Mexico to the US with his mother, feasted on bottles of vitamin gummies on a regular basis, thinking they were candy (both the patient and his mother spoke Spanish, but not English), inflicting serious damage to his bones and liver through Hypervitaminosis A, culminating in a moment where he downed an entire bottle in one go for breakfast, got dizzy and promptly shattered his arm. At no point did he question why his stomach was swelling to an uncomfortable extent, nor why he could see his own veins pulsing underneath the skin stretched taut— both the patient and his mother simply assumed that "Everything is bigger in America, and all Americans (presumably both native and immigrants, going by their logic) are fat."
    • Even more shocking is that the patient’s mother kept buying bottles for her son to eat, and never questioned why the "candy" came in tamper proof containers, nor why the bottles were presumably found inside the medicine aisle of the local supermarket. Finally, the word for ‘Vitamin’ in Spanish is almost identical to its English counterpart, making this example especially egregious!
  • Patient JR in "A Boy Ate 3 Laundry Pods. This Is What Happened To His Lungs" decides to follow the 'Tide Pod Challenge' by eating several laundry detergent pods, severely burning his oesophagus and causing a particularly gruesome form of injury referred to as liquefactive necrosis, where the tissue dies, then disintegrates into a sludge (which in this case is still loaded with toxic chemicals), continuing to corrode everything as it seeps deeper and deeper into the digestive system.
  • A 14-year-old ate 25 brownies laced with laxatives as part of an eating challenge (although he ate way more of them than he should have done) essentially downing almost one jar in one serving, then suffered from Rhabdomyolysis.
  • In the video "Things That Do Not Cure COVID-19 If Ingested", numerous examples are shown, ranging from a relatively harmless case where a Chinese woman ate enough garlic to lose her voice temporarily, to a man drinking an entire bottle of rubbing alcohol, passing out, then recovering, and then someone who thought drinking diluted bleach would disinfect them, causing permanent burns to their throat.
  • In "What (Hydroxy)chloroquine Does To The Body", after reading news on early studies suggesting chloroquine as a potential treatment for the Coronavirus, two patients, Patient JD and Patient KD— a husband and wife— decide to treat themselves... by downing crushed tablets from a bottle of Fish anti-parasite medicine with their soda. The husband died from an intractable heart arrhythmia caused by Hypokalemia, while his wife narrowly survived. Not only was this completely avoidable had this brash and poorly-thought out decision not been made, but the couple weren’t even infected with the virus, so it wouldn’t have done any good to take the fish medicine anyway, even if it had no ill effects.
  • This case really takes the cake, in which Patient GG, a lazy and meme-obsessed 19 year old decides that rather than study during the Coronavirus lockdown, he'll down a whole jar of ground nutmeg for 'clout' on TikTok instead. In addition to suffering from horrendous mental instability (nutmeg's main chemical components, Myristicin and Elemicin, are metabolized by the liver into drugs that are close in resemblance and function to Amphetamine and Mescaline), he obsessively drank water due to another symptom of nutmeg intoxication being dry mouth. This initiated a perfect storm of nervous system chaos in the body that resulted in him being unable to sweat or urinate any of the vast excess of water out of his body, starting Hyponatremia that resulted in multiple seizures as his brain swelled up against the skull. Miraculously, his brain hadn't started herniating, and prompt treatment with hypertonic saline solution saved his life.
    • Taken even further with the similar case of Patient JC, who thought that drinking two whole bottles of Benadryl (more specifically, the US version, the antihistamine diphenhydramine^note as opposed to the version sold in the UK and several other countries, which contains the similar compound cetirizine) was a sure-fire way to chase clout on TikTok (again!) in the so-called 'Benadryl Challenge', a real challenge promoted by teenagers on the site that led to several hospitalisations and at least one confirmed death in 2020. A long chain of dangerous changes took place in her brain, and she very nearly died, but fortunately was saved by doctors, but not without a lingering brain fog which stayed long after the diphenhydramine was removed.
  • Patient GB in "A Man Microdosed Dark Web Bought Mushrooms. This Is What Happened To His Organs.", was suffering from a mild depression— self-diagnosed, mind you, so no one was certain on whether this was the case or not. He decided it was a good idea to buy some shady mushrooms from a website on the dark web to self-medicate himself with. Noticing a strange almond odor on the mushrooms, he thought they were strange, but didn't give it any mind. After eating a few, the measly 20-ish minutes he had to wait to trip was apparently too much and so he decided he's going to microdose. Apparently, this entails improperly boiling the mushrooms down into tea, then injecting them into his veins! Turns out, he should really have reconsidered what he's just done, as a chain of events is underway that nearly results in his death from a three-pronged assault on his body. The almond smell was cyanide, and the trip he thought he was having was really just his cells screaming out for oxygen. Doctors successfully treat this with Vitamin B12, but then find something more perplexing; bacteria and fungi are now in his blood. The bacteria is a common soil species, Brevibacillus brevis, but the fungus is even stranger... it's cells from the mushrooms he injected. Fortunately, antibiotics and antifungals treated these infections, but the process of eliminating the pathogens took quite some time. Ultimately, the entire incident was worthless; since Psilocybin, the precursor to active Psilocin (the psychedelic) has to be metabolised by the liver into the latter, injecting it does absolutely nothing as it bypasses the liver. Patient GB didn't trip, and instead got put into a world of hurt thanks to two infections and a dose of Cyanide.
  • Though he was probably quite unhinged anyway, and would have potentially done the same with anything else telling him not do do something, Conspiracy Theorist Patient KC in "A Dad Ate 25 Packs Silica Gel For Breakfast. This Is What Happened To His Stomach." can count his lucky stars he didn't decide to chow down on something more reactive than silica gel, all because he got angry at the instructions on the packets of gel telling him not to eat it.
  • Patient CJ in "A Student Drank 2 Liters Fiber Supplement For Dinner. This Is What Happened To His Intestines.", despite being a student of nutritional science, decided that he simply wasn't getting enough dietary fibre, despite eating plenty of food rich in the stuff. It all started out fine, with him selecting a dietary fibre supplement of Psyllium seed powder that was mixed with water. After a few days, he had the incredibly stupid idea to eat as much of it as he could, and so he poured an entire bottle into two litres of water. The supplement, which can form a gel if mixed in not enough water, rapidly expanded into one so dense and so glutinous that he couldn't actually drink it. Instead of realising his mistake and promptly throwing it out, he decided that he would eat the entire lot, even spreading it on bread with peanut butter! As he continued to feast on the gel, he eventually clogged up his digestive system to the point that doctors had to perform a laparotomy just to clear the blockage, which could very well have killed him as the gel continued to expand, causing intestinal impaction that would have eventually led to sections of the bowel dying. Amusingly enough, Bernard admits he's made a similar mistake before and clogged his colon as well.
  • Patient JA in "A TikToker Chugged 8 Scoops PreWorkout Supplement. This Is What Happened To His Brain.", who decided that to get more clout and views on his fitness TikTok videos, he'd try out 'dry scooping', the act of eating workout supplement powder (which Bernard points out are an unnecessary type of supplement that tend to do more harm than good) dry, instead of mixing it with water. He had a chance to turn back when he found he had difficulty swallowing a single scoop of powder. However, JA elevated his stupidity to downright idiocy when he had the 'bright' idea to eat four whole scoops of the powder, washed down with four more mixed with water the usual way. In a single dose, JA consumed 17 cups of coffee's worth of caffeine, which together with the stimulant β-Phenylethylamine, caused his heart to beat so hard his blood pressure could not be measured properly, inflicting so much damage to his circulatory system that blood vessels across his brain ruptured, bleeding into his skull. As his brain damage increased, doctors were only able to save him by infusing hypertonic solution and cutting pieces of his skull off to relieve the pressure. In effect, JA ate so much caffeine that part of his brain exploded.
  • Though it could be somewhat justified by his loneliness and desire to make friends at the office he worked at, Patient JS in "A Gamer Drank 12 Energy Drinks In 10 Minutes. This Is What Happened To His Organs." needlessly put himself in harm's way and suffered an extremely painful bout of pancreatitis and the beginnings of septic shock after he drank 12 cans of caffeine-rich energy drinks in 10 minutes, busting up his blood vessels and damaging his pancreas. Though his body tried to mitigate the damage by sending white blood cells into the pancreas to repair the injury, the inflammation got infected by bacteria from the intestines, damaging several other organs after it spilled into JS's bloodstream. Again, just like JA above, all of this would have never happened had JS never decided to do such a stupid thing.
  • Patient BW in "A TikToker Drank 1 Liter Cough Syrup. This Is What Happened To His Brain." became addicted to cough syrup after a party, and worked his "purple drank" habit into his TikTok vids. Eventually, his addiction leads to him passing out and ceasing breathing, due to a genetic mutation that prevents his liver from breaking down codeine, the depressant component of cough syrup, into the chemically-inactive norcodeine: his liver was only able to break codeine down into morphine, which led to his passing out and suffering brain damage due to hypoxia. After being discharged, he tried to fight his withdrawal symptoms by taking entire boxes of loperamide, a medicine typically used to treat loose stools that is structurally similar to the addiction treatment medicine methadone. Unfortunately, loperamide is also structurally similar to disopyramide, which is used to treat heart rhythm disorders. In large amounts, disopyramide binds to the heart and disrupts electrical impulses that allow it to beat. Tragically, BW would never recover from this and died after attempts to resuscitate him failed.
  • Patient JT in "A Student Ate 108 Gummy Antacids For Breakfast. This Is What Happened To Her Kidneys." might take the cake here. Because of JT's love of spicy food, her stomach became so acidic that it caused ulcers. She was prescribed antibiotics, but it gave her an unfortunate side effect of major depression. Things seemed to get better for JT when she switched to antacids, but when trying out antacid gummies, she ends up eating an entire bottle for breakfast because she believes it will allow her to eat all the spicy food she can have. Unfortunately, she would end up eating 2 bottles of gummy antacids, resulting in hypercalcemia and damaging her kidneys severely enough to put her on dialysis.
  • Patient CG and his friends in "A Boy Rubbed 1 Tube Pain Relief Cream Between His Legs. This Is What Happened To His Brain." largely qualify, after one of them challenges the rest to a dare after he throws up from eating pizza that's three weeks old: eat the same pizza he did, or apply a whole tube of pain relief cream to the genital area. Patient CG decides that the cream is the safer bet and rubs a whole tube of Bengay on his inner thighs, which ends up giving him an intense burning sensation that another application of Bengay doesn't alleviate. Due to the scrotal skin being much more absorbent than most other parts of the skin, he ends up absorbing the salicylate equivalent of 55 large aspirin tablets, poisoning his blood and giving him the appearance of a diabetic attack which lands him in hospital. It's not until one of the friends admits to what happened that the medical team is able to treat him correctly in the nick of time.
  • Patient MB in "A Scientist Inhaled 3 Liters Poison Gas. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys." was a chemistry teacher who had a habit of livening up classes by making gases that he'd inhale to change his voice. Despite the dangers involved, he makes a large batch of hydrogen gas and breathes it all in several doses, unwittingly poisoning himself with arsine gas due to arsenic contamination of the components he used, resulting in jaundice, vomiting and kidney failure. As the case took place in 1841, while doctors were able to eventually diagnose his condition, medical science wasn't advanced enough to save him from passing away after a week of hospitalization.
  • Patient GW in A Farmer Mistakenly Drank His Own Herbicide. This is What Happened to His Brain." would store herbicide in Gatorade bottles, next to actual bottles of Gatorade, something so dangerous that herbicide bottles specifically tell you not to do this. Naturally, he accidentally took a swig of herbicide, which would eventually kill him through multiple organ failure.
  • Patient PT in "A Farmer Sprayed 1 Liter Herbicide Inbetween His Legs. This Is How His Organs Shut Down." attempted to treat an STD he got cheating on his wife by spraying paraquat all over his groin on a regular basis, later making sure it wouldn't dry off by using a diaper in spite of the fact that he was already suffering noticeable poisoning symptoms by this point. This resulted in paraquat being absorbed into his bloodstream and attacking his lungs as if he'd drunk it, leading to his death.
  • The episodes on food poisoning tend to attract lots of comments about how many viewers' friends and relatives are shockingly lackadaisical about food safety.
• Trademark Favourite Food:
  • Patient DA in "A Student Ate Only Chips And French Fries For 10 Years. This Is What Happened To His Eyes.", who ate nothing but potato chips, french fries and white bread for ten years straight because he obsessively liked the texture. It backfired on a massive scale, since potatoes and bread contain virtually no Vitamin B12, a vital nutrient that influences everything from red blood cell production to keeping nerves healthy, eventually resulting in the teen contracting severe anemia and losing his eyesight and hearing because the nerves involved essentially died from a lack of adequate nutrients.
  • Patient CC in "A Grandma Ate Cookie Dough For Lunch Every Week. This Is What Happened To Her Bones.", who enjoyed eating some of the left over cookie dough from baking cookies every week. She didn't know it until diagnosis, but she had been unknowingly infected with HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion a few decades prior, and was unknowingly becoming infected with Salmonella bacteria every time she ate the dough. Without a healthy immune system to fight the relatively common bacteria, the germs eventually damaged an old, healed fracture site in her leg to the point that it broke again in the exact same spot from the strain of simply standing upright. Fortunately, treatment with antiretroviral drugs put the HIV virus down, and kept it down to the point that the patient was able to recover and stay healthy.
• Trashcan Bonfire: An extreme example presents in "A Soldier Was Exposed to a Burnpit. This is What Happened to Her Organs." During the Iraq War, some forward operating bases created "burnpits" to dispose of garbage with burning jet fuel. The smoke and fumes created from these burnpits contributed to some soldiers, including Patient KT, developing aggressive cancer.
• Troubled Teen: Patient KT faces a particularly gut-wrenching contemplation of this trope in "A Soldier Inhaled Burning Garbage Fumes While Deployed. This Is What Happened To Her Organs." when she considers the fact that she may die before her son grows up, and brings up that if she dies sooner rather than later, her son might grow into a delinquent in his teens.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Patient BB’s son in “A Dad Drank A Snowglobe. This Is What Happened To His Kidneys.”, who witnessed his relapsing father, desperate for alcohol due to severe withdrawal, down a snow globe containing ethylene glycol, wander into his room delirious before walking back out and collapsing to the floor in the hall. Rather than do the logical thing and investigate further, the kid instead just relaxed and went back to his gaming session, only calling the ambulance 2 days later when he noticed his dad hadn’t actually moved from the spot where he fell. Assuming BB’s son had to tend to his own needs, how he somehow neglected to notice this sooner is unclear, but his inaction, whether deliberate or from sheer negligence, resulted in his father suffering serious damage to his kidneys as the ethylene glycol was metabolised into oxalic acid, which then reacted with calcium in his body to produce tiny, insoluble, and destructive calcium oxalate crystals.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • After Patient LE consumes a pound of chocolate in the titular video, she ends up getting constipation so bad she gives herself an aneurysm from the forced exertion of passing motion.
  • Patient AJ’s roommate in “A Student Ate 5 Day Old Pasta For Lunch. This Is How His Liver Shut Down.” The patient, a student, had accidentally left out some pre-prepared pasta for two days, where it had become contaminated with the bacteria Bacillus cereus, only for his roommate to put the spoilt pasta into the fridge, thinking it had only been out for a few hours. Three days later, AJ ate the pasta, became infected with the bacteria, and suffered a horrible death after the bacteria, an uncommon strain capable of producing the toxin cereulide, destroyed his liver with the deadly chemical, and no transplant was available in time to save him.
  • Continuing the hepatic^note a term referring to the liver theme, Patient CG’s father in “A Student Ate Leftover Potato Salad For Lunch. This Is What Happened To Her Liver.”, who didn’t know that it’s a very bad idea to pickle food with a copper pot,^note Because large amounts of copper compounds leach into the food as a result of vinegar reacting with any exposed copper on the surface of the pot’s interior as he did with the dill pickles in his home cooked potato salad. While CG’s dad ultimately suffered a minor case of copper toxicity that resulted in some digestive discomfort, CG suffered from a condition called Wilson’s disease, in which her body was unable to produce the proteins required to move copper in, out and around the body, especially within the liver. The copper compounds increased to lethal levels after she ate the salad, and proceeded to critically damage her liver to the point that she was in end-stage liver failure, but fortunately a transplant was available this time.
  • In the case of a 79-year-old Patient KC in "A Grandpa Set His Clock Forward 1 Hour. This Is What Happened To His Heart", stress brought on from daylight savings time taking effect was enough to tip his struggling heart into having a full-blown heart attack.
  • Patient JC's roommate in "A Student Ate Suspicious Leftovers For Lunch. This Is What Happened To His Limbs." accidentally put JC into a near-death situation through one unintentional, if gross decision; giving him his leftovers to eat, which not only had reportedly made him vomit - which the roommate apparently thought wasn't too big a deal, because he was fine even though he could see JC's condition worsening - but were contaminated with his spit which contained Neisseria meningitidis, a bacterial member of the roommate's mouth flora. This species of bacteria was a harmless commensal for him, but a dangerous invader for JC, as he wasn't fully vaccinated against it, which would have otherwise allowed his immune system to keep it in check. Once the bacteria made its way into JC's bloodstream, it wreaked havoc on his body, causing the body's supply of platelets to be completely depleted through a condition referred to as purpura fulminans, creating tiny blood clots that blocked blood from getting to his organs and limbs. In the end, some of JC's fingers and both of his legs had to be amputated, all because of his roommate's hopelessly compromised judgement.
  • Patient AC in "A Man Drank Suspicious Coconut Water For Lunch. This Is What Happened To His Brain." took a drink from a coconut that had been apparently sitting unrefrigerated for a month. Despite spitting out the drink due to how disgusting it tasted and rinsing his mouth thoroughly, the tiny bit he did end up swallowing was contaminated with 3-nitroproprionic acid, a mitochondrial toxin produced by the fungus Arthrinium saccharicola that had been growing in the coconut. This toxin behaves much like cyanide, and interferes with the body's ability to produce energy, rapidly causing lethal problems to occur. His liver fails due to the toxin, prompting hyperammonemia that causes his brain, muscles, and kidneys to shut down one after another, and he passes away 26 hours after admittance to the emergency room.
• Wham Line:
  • "A Man Played Video Games Nonstop For 73 Hours. This Is How His Organs Shut Down." starts with one:
  "DC is a 25 year old man, presenting to the emergency room dead on arrival."
  • More generally, the phrase "At autopsy" being the reveal that a patient didn't make it.
• Worst Aid:
  • Perhaps the epitome of this is 45 year old KC, who decided the best way to deal with his melanoma was to cut it out by himself with a pocket knife. All this achieved was getting fragments of the tumor lodged everywhere else in his body, including his brain, where they could grow uncontrolled.
  • Patient JD, who was suffering from severe insomnia, decides that - in addition to the quetiapine (Seroquel) she was prescribed by her doctor to treat a case of depression - self-medication is the way forward, and begins frequently overdosing on diphenhydramine (Benadryl) to knock herself out. However, this only succeeds in making her insomnia even worse, to the point that she stays awake for nine days straight, and also causes her internal organs to begin malfunctioning, leading to huge sections of her colon dilating, being unable to get blood to properly perfuse through them, and then dying, forcing doctors to cut the pieces out and stitch what was left of the organ back together. What could have been an easy fix with proper medical advice turned into permanent, irreparable damage to her body.
  • Patient BW makes the mistake that ultimately ends his life after he listens to his friend, who recommends he deliberately overdose on Loperamide to self-medicate his opioid withdrawal following his addiction to Lean (also known as Purple Drank)^note A highly addictive mix of codeine-containing cough syrup, crushed boiled sweets and soda, an addiction which already caused him brain damage. As Loperamide is an opioid like codeine or morphine, it can behave like the opioid medicine Methadone when taken in large amounts, forcing it into the brain and overwhelming the brain's attempts to pump it back out. However, Loperamide can also behave like the heart rhythm medicine Disopyramide, designed to slow the heart rate down in people with tachycardia. Ultimately, Patient BW died after he consumed enough Loperamide to stop his heart completely, with doctors unable to restart it.
  • Patient GC, who starts off his case being unhealthily obese, does this repeatedly. First, instead of deciding to accept that that doctors could help him by giving him an exercise regimen to follow, he refuses, and instead has a gastric bypass surgery - while this is an extreme solution for a problem that could be fixed in a much less invasive way, at least it's a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, this is where his logic completely goes out the window, since afterwards he gets cocky and refuses to take his Vitamin B12 supplements and instead begins bingeing on hundreds of Vitamin C and zinc gummies a day, even resorting to swallowing whole tubes of zinc denture paste when he couldn't find the gummies. Eventually, his developing Vitamin B12 deficiency damages his spinal cord, and he falls down the stairs, breaks his leg and is hospitalised. After being discharged, his distrust of doctors manifests again, and he gets right back to business, gorging on yet more zinc supplements and denture paste until he gets sent to the emergency room again from the calcium oxalate and hypocupremia that damaged his kidneys. Somehow, he survived all this, even though his actions border on being not just stupid, but lethally so.
  • Patient GG decides that downing dextromethorphan cough syrup and caplets is the only effective way to cure her bouts of depression, and the combined doses end up giving her seizures. As she's been regularly throwing away her normal medication to make it look as though she's been eating them, nobody realizes she has a cough syrup habit and she gets prescribed anti-seizure medicine... that she also keeps throwing away. What finally puts her in the emergency room is a combination of herbal medicines she purchases online, and drinking almost two bottles of cough syrup, that prompts her body to continuously release serotonin and causes her organs to shut down from the signal overload.
  • Patient JT refuses to take antibiotics for her stomach ulcer, brought on by overconsumption of spicy foods, due to the depressing thoughts and mood swings they cause. Instead she manages the pain with antacids, eventually switching to gummy-based ones which she starts eating regularly with breakfast. She comes to replace her breakfast with the gummies entirely, believing that they helped her to eat spicy foods again, not realizing that she was overdosing her body with dangerous levels of calcium. After accidentally eating 108 gummies in one sitting and vomiting blood afterwards, she checks herself into the emergency room while confused and weak. While doctors were able to save her and warn her about the risks of antacid overconsumption, the kidney damage brought on by the hypercalcemia proves irreparable, dooming her to a life of dialysis.
  • Patient KJ opts for alternative medication following a life of family and doctors downplaying her symptoms since childhood, leading to her body getting ravaged from lupus. Reading up on hydrogen peroxide, she decides to start applying diluted "35% food grade hydrogen peroxide" to her skin before moving onto drinking it, believing that the solution would simply decompose harmlessly into water and oxygen in the body. Unfortunately, she ends up drinking a cup of the concentrated stuff after mislabeling her containers, leading to brain damage as the concentrated peroxide decomposed in her bloodstream and caused blockages in her brain, on top of the caustic burns on her throat and foaming at the mouth.
  • Patient PT tried to treat an STD by regularly spraying paraquat onto his groin, and not long after he started doing this wore a diaper over it to prevent it from drying out despite already showing poisoning symptoms by this point. Because scrotal skin is far more absorbent than skin elsewhere, he ended up absorbing a dose of paraquat equal to drinking it into his bloodstream, leading to ultimately fatal lung damage.
• You Are Too Late:
  • By the time Patient DC is found unresponsive at the internet café following him suffering a pulmonary embolism, it is far too late to save him— he presents to the emergency room dead on arrival, and though he is revived, is brain dead, and eventually taken off life support.
  • Patient VP was also found too late to avoid critical brain damage induced by cardiac arrest brought on by hypokalemia from his excessive licorice consumption.
  • By the time Patient GW presented to the emergency room after accidentally ingesting pesticide containing diquat dibromide, it had already reached his kidneys: the poison had spread so extensively throughout his body that his only hope was to be placed into a medically-induced coma while doctors tried to remove the poison from him. He only has time enough to say his goodbyes to his family and relay his final wishes to the doctors in case he never recovers, and in spite of the doctors' best efforts, he ultimately succumbs to the poisoning.
• Your Head Asplode: A downplayed example, given the limitations of Real Life, but Patient JA had part of his brain's circulation effectively explode after chowing down on four scoops of caffeine stimulant powder, washed down with four more in water. His blood pressure rose so high, and his heart was beating so hard that blood vessels ruptured across his entire brain, forcing doctors to cut his skull open to relieve the pressure, as his brain had started to be crushed against the skull by the horrendous haemorrhaging.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: Judging by the amount of episodes revolving around extremely stupid decisions made by teenagers and young adults, the results of dangerous challenges spread about online by idiots dumb enough to encourage others to take part at the expense of their health, plus extremely stupid reactions to the medical conditions of others made by young people that still should have known better, it would seem this trope is very much in effect.

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A student opened TV Tropes. This is what happened to their free time.