Aspirin and Tylenol HOW NOT TO COMMIT SUICIDE

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HOW NOT TO COMMIT SUICIDEby Art Klein

 

....The two most common types of drugs in suicides,McKinney said, are those found around the house andthose used in psychotherapy.

Seemingly innocentaspirin is "one of the messiest, most complicatedoverdoses you ever hope to see," he said. People whoswallow lots of aspirin react first by getting sick totheir stomachs.

Beyond that, it affects nearly everysystem in the body unpredictably, and two differentpeople who took 100 aspirins could get sick incompletely different ways. Aspirin is an acid. Itburns the gastrointestinal tract from the inside. Itchanges the blood's pH level which is normally at 7.4(close to neutral).

It sometimes makes the bloodacidic, but it also accelerates the brains' breathingcontrol center, which puffs out carbon dioxide twiceas fast as it normally would, and thus makes the bloodalkaline.

 

Either way, it throws off the metabolicbalance among kidney, lung and blood. "It producesfever," McKinney said. "The fever, in turn, if it goeson long enough to overheat the brain, can causeseizures. You can burn out parts of your nervoussystem." Aspirin also carries a high risk of gastrichemorrhage. Occasionally people on aspirin overdosesbecome deaf or develop a ringing in their ears thatdoesn't go away.

 

The pain-reliever acetaminophen, sold as Tylenol, alsomakes people sick to their stomachs at first, but thengets more deadly.

The drug changes into toxicparticles that are usually neutralized by glutathione,one type of coenzyme found in the liver. In overdose,if it isn't pumped out in time, the toxic particlesdeplete all of the glutathione, causing the painfuldeath of an hepatic coma.

Even relatively late in theprocess surrogate glutathione can save the liver, butif the organ does become diseased the results can besimilar to those of hepatitis: jaundice, itchy skin,depression, long-term listlessness, inability to eatmuch.

 

"The liver detoxifies poisons that build up in thebody," McKinney said. "If you destroy the liver it'slike never taking the garbage out. Specifically themost common build up is ammonia in the blood, whichyou know if it goes too far will put you in a verydeep coma, and then kill you."

 

Both McKinney and Bedard told me about people who tookTylenol or phosphorous, which also destroys the liver(and incidentally produces phosphorescent vomit). In both cases, they slept off the initial sickness andrecovered for five days -- during which time theydecided suicide was a mistake after all and theywanted to live. But the liver had been destroyed andafter five days each of them started to feel verysick, passed into deep coma, and died.