Randy Schmitz, 30 year old, native of Illinois, fell on the ground in a seizure after tasting a hot sauce prepared with carolina reaper, scorpion and habanero peppers. During treatment, an MRI scan of his brain showed a cancerous tumor in its early stages.
"If I didn't try that, I think something eventually would have triggered the seizure and I would've found out, but that cancer tumor would've grown in my head," Schmitz told the Chicago Tribune.
Brain Tumor
Brain tumors are the abnormal growth of brain cells that may be benign or metastatic. Brain tumors account for about 2.4% of all the tumor diagnosesandare most challenging due to their critically delicate location.
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He underwent brain surgery a couple of days later. Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital removed a two-and-a-half-inch by one-and-a-half-inch malignant tumor from Schmitz's frontal lobe.
Jeffrey Raizer, medical director of neuro-oncology at Northwestern Medical Hospital, said that though it can't be proven that the hot sauce triggered the seizure, the tasting conditions, including dehydration and stress, match those known to lead to seizures.
![Headache / Cephalgia]( "Headache / Cephalgia")
A headache literally means 'pain in the head'. It is a common complaint that may occur frequently in some
Raizer added that the seizure allowed Schmitz to be treated with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy before the tumor got worse. Schmitz has a month of chemotherapy treatment and is thankful that he tasted the sauce. "They don't know exactly how long it was in there, so it would have just kept growing and might have gotten to the point where they couldn't remove it," he said. "My life would have been over."
Source: Medindia
Headache / Cephalgia
A headache literally means 'pain in the head'. It is a common complaint that may occur frequently in some
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Raizer added that the seizure allowed Schmitz to be treated with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy before the tumor got worse. Schmitz has a month of chemotherapy treatment and is thankful that he tasted the sauce. "They don't know exactly how long it was in there, so it would have just kept growing and might have gotten to the point where they couldn't remove it," he said. "My life would have been over."
Source: Medindia
Convulsions
Seizure or a convulsion is a result of abnormal electrical activity in the brain. If there are two or more unprovoked seizures at an interval of at least 24 hours, it is referred to as epilepsy.
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 Epilepsy Patients on AEDs Unaware of Fracture RiskAnti-epileptic drugs predispose epilepsy patients to falls and fractures, but sadly, the majority of them unaware of it, say researchers from the University of Melbourne. | Advertisement
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