Chubbyemu's A [Person did this Thing.] This is what happened.

January 14, 2022 10:15 PM

Good taste prevents me from providing a sample video above the fold because Here Thar Be Trigger Warnings. Yar! Short videos describe persons who made incredibly foolish decisions and the results thereof. Very scientific, very horrific descriptions ensue. Please stop and think before clicking upon...

                Chubbyemu's videos.

Sample: A Woman Drank "35% Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide." This What Happened.

         Remember: You have been warned.

posted by y2karl (35 comments total)

Just for the record: I watched the Hydrogen Peroxide video and didn't find it gruesome. No blood, horrible mutilations, or diseases, no corpse, just a very straight-forward (and somewhat dry) description of what happens to your body when you drink this stuff. People have different triggers, but this video did not trip the obvious ones.
posted by CCBC at 10:49 PM on January 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well, same for me but tastes differ. I know a few people in real life -- some of my test audience -- who got grossed out when I ran these by them. I wanted to err on the side of caution.

But, oh, the detail!
posted by y2karl at 10:55 PM on January 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

The one about the woman, PhD or MD I forget which, who was exposed to two drops of methyl mercury on the back of one hand through an intact protective glove in the course of her medical research and died a horrible death over a period of weeks was very upsetting. She realized it was serious immediately as I recall, and took precautions, but to no avail.

It might have been the subject of an FPP, but I can’t remember that either.
posted by jamjam at 11:39 PM on January 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

tastes differ.

Indeed. Personally I don't find the commercial 35% blend at all drinkable. Has to have spent at least 15 years in oak or I'm not interested.
posted by flabdablet at 11:42 PM on January 14, 2022 [20 favorites]

The one about the woman, PhD or MD I forget which, who was exposed to two drops of methyl mercury on the back of one hand through an intact protective glove in the course of her medical research...

One of the sweetest jobs I ever had was working as a contractor for the local office of the EPA where they would be notified of various toxic wastes spilled and the people occasionally exposed to them. Which were then addressed by the appropriate state and county agencies at the direction of the EPA.

One involved three Native American children who found a pint of mercury in a old bottle with a glass stopper in a trash heap on their reservation. They unstopped the bottle and played with the mercury a lot. The results were most unfortunate and unpleasant to read. The EPA dealt with that directly and immediately.
posted by y2karl at 12:02 AM on January 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

This one, and she did NOT recognize the seriousness of the event, and barely remembered it when signs and symptoms began to appear months later.
posted by jamjam at 12:02 AM on January 15, 2022

I've watched the "student felt a sharp pain in her side..." one and will say from a medical perspective it's not gross/alarming/terrible, but the drama he imparts through his vocal pattern is something else!

Kudos though for visuals and editing that add to the details he's giving verbally. For example, when he's talking about needing to move people so they don't develop DVT (ie why you're supposed to move around on long flights), he goes into the lungs etc, but then as he goes on to talk about her issue (I don't want to spoiler it for anyone!) the visuals are histopathy of the "business part" of the kidneys. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomerulus_(kidney) He's not talking about that yet, but it's a fun nod to anyone with a medical background watching it.

It's high drama but very well done. I thought we were going to learn about cat scratch fever, but that was a fake out - just like a real case :)
posted by esoteric things at 12:05 AM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Saying 'Presenting to the emergency room...' while wagging his right index finger seems to be a thing with him. It is not without its charm.
posted by y2karl at 12:08 AM on January 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Emia" meaning "presence in blood"
posted by eustatic at 12:27 AM on January 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

"Hypo" meaning low, "glo" meaning sugar -- from the Classical Greek glukus for sweetness.

Oh man, now I am feeling dizzy and lightheaded...
posted by y2karl at 12:33 AM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

This one , and she did NOT recognize the seriousness of the event, and barely remembered it when signs and symptoms began to appear months later.

Karen Wetterhahn - guessing she does get named here in the end but in case she doesn’t I think she should be. And yeah at the time it wasn’t really understood that dimethylmercury could rapidly penetrate latex gloves, otherwise she would have been wearing something more protective.
posted by atoxyl at 3:02 AM on January 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

I appreciate that he brings in elementary chemistry as a tool for understanding how the body works.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:46 AM on January 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

She is named in the comments, and it was made clear that she is revered. The gloves she was wearing were apparently a nitrile formulation, and I remember when those first came into use as a consumer product, they had the reputation that nothing could get through them. I’d bet they were new enough when she was poisoned that very few people knew they were dimethyl mercury permeable.
posted by jamjam at 4:02 AM on January 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I reserve "Gas Station Sushi" as my next band name.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 4:16 AM on January 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fuck Daylight Saving Time forever.
posted by flabdablet at 5:09 AM on January 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Indeed. Personally I don't find the commercial 35% blend at all drinkable. Has to have spent at least 15 years in oak or I'm not interested.

"i mean i like oxidative wines like sherry, vin jaune etc, so Vivino recommended this.

little too fizzy for my taste. clearly NV. also kinda sterile. "
posted by lalochezia at 5:24 AM on January 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

> The gloves she was wearing were apparently a nitrile formulation, and I remember when those first came into use as a consumer product, they had the reputation that nothing could get through them.

I’m not blaming her at all for not knowing, but if you use nitriles for glassware washup with acetone or even IPA you quickly realise they are essentially no better than cloth for many organics. Their main advantages are comfort and being puncture-evident.

Thinking of organomercuries, in his memoir ‘Ignition!’ John Clark mentions trying to get a hundred pounds of monomethylmercury to use as a rocket fuel, but even the big chemical manufacturers he sourced all sorts of crazy stuff (FLOX, ClF5, et c) from wouldn’t touch it. (In the end he did an end run around the problem by simply injecting metallic mercury into the combustion chamber - apparently it worked as desired to improve the volumetric impulse (although of course not the mass impulse) of the rocket)
posted by memetoclast at 6:31 AM on January 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Presenting to the emergency room
posted by ambilevous at 6:54 AM on January 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Fat shaming rant
posted by flabdablet at 7:11 AM on January 15, 2022

Chubbyemu could recite the Medical Dictionary from memory and it would be captivating.

oh wait
posted by chavenet at 7:15 AM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ex= a has been
...(s)pert = a drip under pressure.

Oops. (I'll let myself out)
posted by mule98J at 8:26 AM on January 15, 2022

I watched the one about the woman who ate 23 bananas after fasting for a week - really fascinating and interesting to me because I'm interested in medically supervised fasting, so I read stuff from that world, and being vegan means I get exposed to the people who recommend eating 30 bananas a day. My understanding is that a healthy person should not fast without medical supervision for more than three days.

Anyway, this is really fascinating and a great thing to post. I appreciate the trigger warning because there are some I'm not going to watch. Also, just learned that methly mercury is different that the mercury I played with as a child in the 60s when my mom broke a thermometer (all of us involved have cancer or have died from cancer, but it was more than 50 years until I was diagnosed, so I'm not convinced it was a cause).

(I wish someone would do this to explain how drugs work. I would like to understand the mechanisms behind some of the side effects I'm experiencing, and I can't find anything that explains this.)
posted by FencingGal at 8:40 AM on January 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

The progression of his channel is fascinating:

- starts off as a gaming channel; his account name is ChubbyemuGames and six years ago, it's all gaming content
- weight loss video makes it big, much bigger than any gaming video
- starts pivoting to fitness and powerlifting
- all gaming content stops around 2016
- becomes a medical / meme channel around 2017
posted by meowzilla at 9:44 AM on January 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

truly a bildungsroman for 2022
posted by eustatic at 12:49 PM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

This guy's the best doctor I've seen on video since Jonathon Miller. And everybody should see his COVID one. Thanks!
posted by Rash at 1:23 PM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

That fat shaming rant isn’t as anti fat-shaming as it claims to be. Obesity is a temporary state that people can just change if they want to and it isn’t “always” the obese person’s fault? For fuck’s sake. I don’t suggest you use it as a resource for teaching how to avoid fat shaming.
posted by janell at 3:06 PM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yea, until today I'd only seen his medical mysteries format. The self improvement content is very ... grain of truth mixed with a gallon of toxic bro culture.
posted by pwnguin at 4:11 PM on January 15, 2022

The 30 bananas has me thinking about this bit from QI:
Cracks me up every time.
posted by coppertop at 5:50 PM on January 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

One involved three Native American children who found a pint of mercury in a old bottle with a glass stopper in a trash heap on their reservation.

Years ago I worked in the Geological Museum in London, and we shared premises with Natural History. I spent a lot of time in the chem lab and, it being a very old and distinguished place, people used to find all sorts of stuff that had been lost in storerooms and cupboards for decades.

Anything vaguely chemical used to come to us for identification and disposal, and I definitely remember the several pints of mercury in a brown Winchester with a brown glass stopper. Some of it was harmless (pints of oil of cloves and wintergreen), but some definitely not (thallium salts and picric acid). A guy from the local council used to come round in an old van with sandbags in the back and take it all away.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 2:04 PM on January 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting post! The two I watched were surprisingly thoughtful rather than mean. (I'm going to download and turn the rest into audio files, 'cause I'm a weirdo who becomes incredibly impatient watching videos like this. But, I'm looking forward to listening to them.)

I can definitely see myself fasting for five days and then eating twenty bananas. (I've fasted for several days and eaten only bananas and dates for several days.) I probably wouldn't come into it with low body weight and vitamin deficiencies, but that's not because I'd have known better.
posted by eotvos at 9:09 AM on January 18, 2022

Interesting post! The two I watched were surprisingly thoughtful rather than mean.

The medical videos? All the ones I’ve seen are pretty compassionate, even though they’re about weird cases. Worth noting that when he calls himself “doctor” I’m pretty sure he’s a PharmD or something like that, though. From the way he presents himself combined with the subject matter I originally thought he was an E.R. doc. And I think some are composites of multiple cases in the literature, though some are very real stories of specific individuals (like the K.W. mercury one mentioned above). Actually I have a vague memory that he did one where he turns out to be the subject.
posted by atoxyl at 2:56 PM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Chubbyemu also has a second channel called Heme Review, which tackles similar and sometimes even the same content from a more technical perspective. (For instance, there is a version of the aforementioned 23 Bananas video on both channels)
posted by Glier's Goetta at 9:05 AM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

The medical videos? All the ones I’ve seen are pretty compassionate, even though they’re about weird cases. Worth noting that when he calls himself “doctor” I’m pretty sure he’s a PharmD or something like that, though.

That's what I meant. Looks like you've called his degree. And it seems pretty relevant to the content I've seen. I don't really know what using the word doctor means in a medical context. (Using the word on youtube when you have a PhD doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. But, maybe I'm missing something subtle.)
posted by eotvos at 10:07 AM on January 19, 2022

I’d consider it a little odd, and potentially misleading in a way that you may or may not consider important. The cultural norm in the U.S. for most non-MD doctorates is that it’s a little pretentious to go by “doctor” outside of a very formal context. And in a medical setting, talking about a clinical perspective, talking about what happens in the E.R., the natural assumption hearing “doctor” is that he’s an M.D. working in the E.R. I’m not saying his information is bad - to my non-M.D. knowledge it’s not - and in fact he may have relevant work experience from a pharmacy/toxicology perspective. It’s just a little weird.
posted by atoxyl at 8:16 PM on January 19, 2022

Thanks, atoxyl. It certainly would seem weird to use the word in a forum among peers in my own academic field, which is entirely removed from anything vaguely related to medicine. (I do sheepishly use it when booking airline tickets and hotel rooms; the lore is that you're more likely to get an upgrade. I'm not sure upgrades actually exist any longer.) I guess I sort of implicitly assumed a youtube intro was similar to the cover of a popular book, where it seems to be common even in cases where it is far less warranted. But, it makes sense that it gets more complicated when talking about things that real doctors also talk about. I appreciate the comments.
posted by eotvos at 9:33 AM on January 20, 2022