Paracetamol overdose - the consequences

'm driving on this particular shift, my crewmate is in the back dealing with the patient.

I'm grinding my teeth at the waste.

The patient is almost certainly going to die - he's taken an overdose. The tablets he's taken, and the way he's taken them, mean that parts of his body will start to fail over the next few days. His immediate future is hospital bed, then an ITU bed, then either waiting for a transplant or death. It's too late for any treatment to work on him.

He's not in any pain, he doesn't feel weak, he has no symptoms.

He talks to my crewmate. The body language suggests that he is upset but not suicidally depressed.

It was one of those 'cry for help' things - asking why he did it gets the answer that he wanted to die, but now they don't. It's a common enough reason - that they change their mind and then phone us.

Everyone can get these pills - you can read the inference, how can they be that dangerous if you can buy them over the counter?

He lives in a nice house, has a family, had his future ahead of him.

I suspect that he thinks that they'll have a 'stomach pump', a chat with the psychiatrists and then come home. He doesn't realise the damage that he has done to his body.

We don't talk about the outcome to the patient - we'll leave that to the hospital after his blood tests show if he is telling the truth or not. We'll only see him for the ten minutes it takes us to drive him to hospital.

I'm hoping that the patient is lying, that he hasn't done what he says he has, but the empty pill packets speak for themselves.

I know I'll be thinking about him for the next few months long after I've forgotten his name.

His mother is travelling with him.

He's fourteen years old.

There are almost no immediate effects from a paracetamol overdose. After about 18 to 24 hours, you may get some nausea/vomiting, and not a lot else. After that, you start to feel a bit better, for a short time. Then you start to notice some abdominal pain. In the next few days, you turn yellow. You become confused, and may hallucinate. Your blood pressure is low, and you leak fluid under your skin until you look like the Michelin man. Your failing liver can no longer make the proteins that allow your blood to clot so you start to bleed. You bleed from the holes that are made as people collect blood samples, you bleed under your skin, you can bleed from anywhere and every where. Your kidneys will fail, meaning you need dialysis. At this stage, if you do not get a liver within a short period of time, you will die. Medicine has yet to invent a machine that can replace the work of the liver. Hopefully you will be unconcious as your near the end, because it is highly unpleasant.

There are almost no immediate effects from a paracetamol overdose. After about 18 to 24 hours, you may get some nausea/vomiting, and not a lot else. After that, you start to feel a bit better, for a short time. Then you start to notice some abdominal pain. In the next few days, you turn yellow. You become confused, and may hallucinate. Your blood pressure is low, and you leak fluid under your skin until you look like the Michelin man. Your failing liver can no longer make the proteins that allow your blood to clot so you start to bleed. You bleed from the holes that are made as people collect blood samples, you bleed under your skin, you can bleed from anywhere and every where. Your kidneys will fail, meaning you need dialysis. At this stage, if you do not get a liver within a short period of time, you will die. Medicine has yet to invent a machine that can replace the work of the liver. Hopefully you will be unconcious as your near the end, because it is highly unpleasant.

I think 13-year old attention-seeking MySpacewhores all over the world should be forced to read this.