Posted on 10/07/2012 5:39:32 PM PDT by Olog-hai
An 18-year-old woman has had her stomach removed to save her life after drinking a cocktail containing liquid nitrogen.
Gabby Scanlan had been drinking at Oscars wine bar in Lancaster to celebrate her 18th birthday when she was left feeling breathless. After developing serious stomach pain, she was rushed to Lancaster Royal Infirmary where she diagnosed with a perforated stomach. The young woman, from the village of Heysham in Lancashire, then underwent emergency surgery to remove her stomach, reported ITV News. …
Liquid nitrogen is pure nitrogen in a liquid state at a very low temperature. It boils at –196°C (–320.8°F), and can cause rapid freezing when it comes into contact with living tissue. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
is it even possible to do this?
i would think the rapidly heating gas would expand so much as to make it impossible to swallow
I dont think the muscles that force food down the esophagus would work once frozen SOLID
I HAVE put dry ice in drinks - a little chip to chill and carbonate it but I didn’t put the dry ice in my mouth and there is a difference of 120 deg C after all...
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I sometimes use dry ice to revive a flat 2 liter bottle ... but it stinks for cooling a regular drink ,, for some reason it just doesn’t transfer the cold very well.. simple crushed wet ice is best.. I was at a trade show where they were selling a setup for making ice cream using LN2 ... but that was pretty safe ,, fogger type spray into the mixing bowl ... YUMMY!
Oh, I have been known to put liquid nitrogen in my mouth and blow vapor rings. I never thought to swallow it though.
I put it in my hands then toss it on coworkers when they aren’t looking. They cant figure out why their back just got extremely cold. :) These are all very small amounts because once you get over about a single cc then its gets to be too much at once. Much like salt in a recipe. A little bit does the trick, but too much ruins the recipe.
There is probably a certain amount of time you are supposed to wait before you drink the drink. The nitrogen is most likely meant to chill the drink into a slush and if you take it in before its done then you freeze your stomach. Or it might have been a numbers game where you ingest 2 or 3 of these drinks and you are OK, but 6 causes damage.
The body temperature is so far above liquid nitrogen’s boiling point that it will actually create a insulating shield for a small amount of time.
I put my hands in it as a trick at work all the time. I even put it in my mouth and blow vapor rings.
Yes its dangerous, and maybe I like to flirt with danger. :)
My buddy was a PhD chemist at Penn State, and he would take me into the lab after the bars closed. He would work on some reaction, and I would come up with as many fun things to do with liquid nitrogen as I could. One time I filled one of the sinks with liquid nitrogen and (very carefully) peed into it...the vapor cloud was a sight to behold. The next morning people were trying to figure out what the giant yellow ice cube in the sink was.
I don’t think it could have been one drink. I think a series of lets say 8-10 drinks were the culprit. You can probably drink one drink that is -60f but not 6 in a row. Something like that.
I don’t know what the temperature of the drink was but I agree that I don’t think you could reliably drink liquid nitrogen. If it managed to get to your esophagus I think you would either rupture something internally or be belching because of the expanding gas.
I find this hard to believe...if liquid nitrogen, in sufficient quantity to cause this, were put into the drink with any alcohol, the ‘drink’ in the glass would be frozen.
I am very familiar with liquid nitrogen. In high school we had a science fair and my physics teacher got liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen from Iowa State College (now University) and another student and I put on a demonstration with these two gases in a liquid state, both at very low temp. In the course of several demonstrations with each, I put my hand into the liquid nitrogen, then removed it after a few moments (maybe 5 seconds or so)...hand not frozen. The had is warm enough to gasify some of the nitrogen next to it and provide insulation for a very short time. I did this several times during the course of the evening’s demonstrations.
One of the things we did was to freeze a piece of rubber cut from an inner tube, and also freeze mercury on a stick and pound the frozen rubber nail into a piece of wood with the mercury hammer.
Yes, liquid nitrogen is at a very low temperature, low enough to freeze anything...we used it industrially to freeze an extruded rubber tube, then to wire braid over the tube to make hose, and we did this without a mandrel.
All that being said, this story has a lot of stinky poo in it.
?????
This story is just absolutely bizarre. Prayers up for the young woman. She’s going to have a long road ahead of her, including possibly having to learn to eat in a radically different fashion than before (I’m thinking along the lines of feeding tubes or the “small bites/frequent meals” approach some stomach cancer survivors have to adopt).
Someone’s gotta be Rock Hard Stoopit to sell this drink.
It’s all fun til someone gets hurt...or dies....
Freaking retards. They are going to get sued into oblivion and this poor girl has had her life forever altered.
BINGO.. I have seen bartenders chip a piece of dry ice into a drink.. But they always warned the patron to let it fizzle out before drinking.. She swallowed it fast and it reached her stomach before it damaged too much of her throat.. IDIOTS ALL.. Poor thing.. :(
I don’t think it was unreasonable for the girl to assume that an exotic drink served in a public restaurant would be safe for human consumption.
There is a High School chemistry professor who hosts a cook out last day of the school year. He pours about 3 gallons of liquid oxygen into a full bag of charcoal in a Weber kettle with only one briquette burning. The resulting flare up burns all the charcoal and the grill completely in seconds.
Regards,
GtG
As to be expected, YouTube has a vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3_GS0sIVOM
I don’t drink anymore, but it would seem that you are supposed to wait before drinking this stuff down. Would you drink it while it was still smoking? Maybe she was already drunk and just didn’t think about what she was doing.
A life forever changed because of alcohol.
Brain freeze.
This article is pure BU##SH#T; she would not have even been able to get LN2 past her throat much less into her stomach.
I have worked with this stuff often enough to know what it will do to tissue and how fast it converts from a liquid state to a gas.
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