Woman Attempts Suicide… By Injecting Mercury?! [X-Ray Photos]

by Sean Brown
A woman attempted to commit suicide in the most horrible of fashions, injecting elemental mercury into her veins. A photo published to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) shows the x-ray that was taken after the woman went to the emergency room with rapid breathing, a dry cough, and bloody mucous, according to IFLS.com. She managed to recover, and after 10 months, she was surprisingly deemed healthy without any major damage to her organs.
She got the mercury from her office, where the 21-year-old worked as a dental assistant. In all, she injected 10 ml (135 g) into her veins, and the majority of it appeared to collect in her lungs.
From the NEJM:

A chest radiograph showed that the mercury was distributed in the lungs in a vascular pattern that was more pronounced at the bases. The patient was discharged after one week, with improvement in her pulmonary symptoms. Oral chelation therapy with dimercaprol was given for nine months, until the patient stopped the treatment; the urinary mercury level did not change during this period. At follow-up at 10 months, she was healthy, with none of the renal, gastrointestinal, or neurologic effects that can result from the oxidation of mercury in the blood and consequent exposure of these organ systems. The abnormalities on the chest radiograph were still apparent. Although these abnormalities are striking, the absence of clinical toxicity in this patient illustrates the differences in the acute and chronic effects of exposure to elemental mercury, inorganic mercury (e.g., mercuric chloride), and organic mercury (e.g., dimethylmercury). Inorganic and organic mercury are much more toxic than elemental mercury; for example, a dose of 400 mg of mercury in the form of dimethylmercury is usually lethal.

Of all the ways to decide to off yourself, could you imagine the agonizing death this could have caused? The image of the mercury in her lungs is enough to give you chills.
Check it out below and let us know what you think: