Samantha Munns got inflated by a helium tank in real life? Really? I gotta look it up. I'm not being offensive, I'm just curious.
Strange but true. Here's the story from the BBC.
until i see a pic of her inflated, i won't believe it.
until i see a pic of her inflated, i won't believe it.
In that case, you will likely never believe it.
Well, I wouldn't say that, but unless I slept through something in my med school classes, I really don't think this is possible. I've never injected air into my thigh, but I really don't think this was real.
Why would the BBC hoax though, the date of the story wasn't April Fools Day and it was run in many newspapers.
You're in med school? well then it's pretty much the same as a laproscopy procedure.
The BBC wouldn't hoax, they just would've received the story, thought it was funny, and published it without checking the sources.
From insight, the nozzle that impaled her thigh must have stopped at a gap in the muscles, a space between the muscle and the skin, possible explanation for the thigh and abdomen being inflated. But the image I look and the timing explained, must be quite a rush and quite a reflex for her to stop the flow.
If correct, since the action was "instant", it must be a fast flow of released helium and probably 3-5 seconds inflation time before Samantha shuts off the tank. In my case of Perceptual Timing, 3-5 of Sudden Unwanted Inflation is like 0.5-1.5 seconds.
reason of 3-5 seconds before shut off; 1 second of daze (1 second extra for realization), if instinctively, 1 second of reaching the valve (if in pain, 1 extra second), 1 second of shutting off the tank completely.
Plausible?
bostoncowboy wrote:
until i see a pic of her inflated, i won't believe it.In that case, you will likely never believe it.
exactly my point.
That story sounds like something you'd see in world weekly news....
Well, I wouldn't say that, but unless I slept through something in my med school classes, I really don't think this is possible. I've never injected air into my thigh, but I really don't think this was real.
Well, of course i want to believe it happened, and i do have a theory. The BBC are relatively reliable, and the other place i saw it was in the Guardian, also not sensationalist.
Anyway, my theory is that the helium penetrated between superficial and deep fascia. Because it was an inert gas, it was sterile. You can get exudate between fascia so why not gas? The risk is presumably embolism, but i think the fact it was helium is important. It's unusually insoluble in water for a start.
I have collected this story from three different news outlets (in English, anyway), and Samantha's quotes are different in each one. It's an odd one, but it's legit.
Here are the three versions. Granted, Daily Mirror might be a little suspect...but Reuters?
British woman inflated like balloon by helium gas
06:43 p.m Dec 10, 1999 Eastern
LONDON, Dec 10 (Reuters) - A British woman who accidentally punctured her thigh with a helium gas nozzle was inflated like a giant balloon in her London toyshop.
Samantha Munns, who fell on a nozzle used for blowing up children's balloons and was pumped full of helium, on Thursday told reporters she thought she was going to explode.
``I felt faint and sick at first and then very worried and panicky about what might happen. I looked like I was five months pregnant,'' Munns said.
``Doctors gathered around me but they didn't know what to do. It's not every day they have a woman full of helium gas to treat,'' she added.
After scrapping the idea of puncturing her with needles, doctors eventually decided to let Munns' body naturally absorb the non-poisonous gas.
Munns, whose leg and abdomen had swollen to about twice normal size, was forced to wait two weeks while her body slowly deflated.
``I was thinking that if I died they would have to put me in a giant coffin and people wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry,'' she said.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication and redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
<><><>
Saturday 11 December 1999
Woman's inflated tale was no exaggeration
By Sean O'Neill
A SHOPKEEPER was inflated like a novelty balloon after falling on
top of a cylinder of helium gas.
Samantha Munns landed on a canister used for blowing up children's
balloons when she fell off a stepladder in her toyshop. The nozzle
pierced her left thigh and she heard a hiss as the highly
pressurised gas was injected into her body.
Mrs Munns, 35, of Cheltenham, Glos, said yesterday: "It only went on
for a second or two but it was enough to pump my thigh full of
helium and blow it up to two or three times its normal size. I found
myself lying on the floor and I couldn't move. My thigh, my abdomen
and my whole side had swollen up, I looked as if I was five months
pregnant."
Mrs Munns, who has two children, crawled to the phone and contacted
security guards, who called an ambulance. Doctors at the local
hospital consulted experts at Guy's in London before telling her
that the only treatment was to go home and allow the inert gas to
disperse naturally.
A fortnight later Mrs Munns has returned to normal size and is back
at work. She said: "For five days I could not stand up. They told me
to keep as still as possible because any movement would slow down
the dispersal of the gas and recovery would take longer. A surgeon
came to see if there was a way of getting the gas out. He said he
would have to stick 100 needles in to let it escape but that would
have done more damage."
Dr Alison Moon, who treated Mrs Munns at Cheltenham General
Hospital, said she had suffered a lot of pain because the gas had
moved up through her chest. Dr Moon said: "It was the first case I
had seen and I could only find one previous one in any of the books.
Mrs Munns said: "Andy, my husband, says he will now have to tether
me to something every time we go out in case I float away."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 1999. Terms & Conditions of
reading. Commercial information.
<><><>
From The Daily Mirror:
BALLOON WOMAN
Toyshop mum inflated by helium gas in freak fall
SHOPKEEPER Samantha Munns was blown up like a giant balloon when she was pumped full of helium gas in a bizarre accident.
Mum of two Samantha fell from a step-ladder and impaled herself on the sharp nozzle of a helium cylinder she uses to blow up children's balloons in her toy shop.
Within seconds her stomach and left thigh had swollen to twice their normal size as the high-powered jet of pressurised gas surged through her body. Screaming in horror, 35-year-old Samantha was whisked to hospital where baffled doctors scratched their heads.
She was sent home to rest but the next day the swelling was even worse - and moved up to her neck.
In the end she had to lie on her back for five days until the gas dispersed.
"I was finally back to normal after two weeks," Samantha said yesterday.
"Now people all think it's very funny when I tell them about it - I've heard just about every joke there is about balloons, windbags and gas.
"But I was very frightened and thought I was going to die. I could see my whole thigh and stomach instantly blowing up.
"My first thought was that they would have to put me in a giant coffin - and no one would know whether to laugh or cry at my funeral because of the way I died."
Samantha's ordeal began when she slipped backwards from the ladder near a top shelf of her Buttercup Days toyshop in Cheltenham's prestige Regent Arcade.
"Somehow I went down on top of the cylinder," she said. "It's about three feet tall and has a nozzle like a spike on top.
"I felt it puncture my thigh and heard the hiss as the gas went in.
"I couldn't move. My whole side was swollen up and I looked like I was five months pregnant."
Samantha was taken to the casualty unit at Cheltenham General Hospital.
"The doctors all gathered around me but they just didn't know what to do," she said.
"It's not every day they have a woman full of helium gas to treat.
"They phoned Guy's Hospital in London and got a surgeon down to see if there was any way of getting the gas out of me.
"But he said it would take about 100 needles stuck into me to let it escape.That would have done even more damage.
"So they said I would just have to wait while it absorbed into my body and dispersed naturally."
Hospital casualty officer Dr Alison Moon said:"The incident was extremely uncommon. It was the first case I'd ever seen and I could only find one previous one recorded in any of the books."
Samantha's husband Andy, frantic at the time, later saw the funny side.
She sighed: "As the inflated bit spread to my neck he said it would have been better if it had been my chest - so I looked like Pamela Anderson."
© MGN, Ltd, 1997, (0171-293-3000)
One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5AP
The BBC wouldn't hoax, they just would've received the story, thought it was funny, and published it without checking the sources.
I don't think the BBC would publish without checking the sources it's what reporters do (which I imagine will have been a local newspaper) also this was years ago, if they were hoodwinked then they would have come clean by now.
You see although this was a minor story and not really important national news, if the BBC had published something later found to be a hoax then that would be national news and there would be another headline somewhere else saying 'BBC fooled in inflating woman hoax'. Some of us will remember the furore when the BBC mixed up a guy who was waiting in reception for a job interview with a guy who was waiting to be interviewed live on BBC News 24
Hmm...Maybe, but I still am gonna have to vote Hoax until I see more concrete evidence. but we shall see...
dragon_6860 wrote:
Some of us will remember the furore when the BBC mixed up a guy who was waiting in reception for a job interview with a guy who was waiting to be interviewed live on BBC News 24That was hilarious! :D
I don't see why you'd think this was fake. We can trust the BBC.
But it sounds horrible. It's not something I'd ever want to see.
I don't see why you'd think this was fake. We can trust the BBC.But it sounds horrible. It's not something I'd ever want to see.
Agreed with Bacn.
The descriptions have enough details in em that it is difficult for me to spot the hoax. Besides, the doc said that the incident DID happened before but very rare (like once in his records.)
Anyhow! Some "concrete evidence" can be changed to be something else completely different, so I trust by description and quotes with the pics. Since it was long time ago, the pics about it would have been removed to respect Samantha Munns.
Even if this did actually happen, it doesn't sound like something I'd want to watch. I never did find pleasure in seeing people in painful or uncomfortable situations.
there never were any pics accompanying it... but anyway, to reply to Lateral... yeah I'm sure you're right, it's best left in the imagination.
maybe one of these sites mite have more info
http://forums.newart.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=9&sid=d91a3919a70b48a032d135291abfce0f
or http://dermatology.cdlib.org/124/
the words your looking for are "subcutaneous emphysema"
DONT DO ANEY THING STUPID lick me :(
This sounds horrifically painful and terrible. If it's true it's shocking. It may be a hoax, but still, yikes!
I have opposite feelings of this story. It turns me on but it also creeps me out. I wish I only felt the second one.
well the way I see it, she was able to joke about it afterwards so we don't need to be too creeped out about it.
People get creeped out by anything.
If a case like Ms Munns's is not something you guys DONT want to see...too bad for you then. Show me it! XD
I think she took in it stride and had a sense of humor about it because everything turned out okay. It was a freak accident but no harm came from it. Had she been seriously or permanently injured, we probably wouldn't be talking about it this much.
She's out there on Facebook, but I thought it rude to contact her about it nine years later just to say "some of my friends online think you don't exist."
If the Weekly World News reported it, there WOULD be a photo. And it would be obviously fake. So...well, I've seen enough BE and BI morphs to feel that photos aren't always "proof"!
I have used Reuters as a source in my day job for the last 15 years, so if Reuters reports it as news, I am not doubting it. What's more, I have corroborating evidence in front of me that suggests it's legit, and I don't see the evidence that suggests it's a hoax.
See page 37 for a citation to the Times of London with some medical commentary on the case.
Here is another UK source with a different byline.
I believe this is also posted elsewhere on the site, but to further confirm the plausibility/reality of this, almost the same exact thing happened to someone else in 2011. Though it sounds like it was even worse.
Wow, another necro-post! :-) Sounds like a job for "Mythbusters"!
Well, I would rather see old posts revived than new posts on duplicate topics. Especially when the old posts have complete info like this one.
The noting of necroposts always strikes me as funny. Like, would someone go into a library and go "Whoa, old books! What's the deal?" :)
While the thread's still up near the top; Forums that have a rule against necro-posting do so because the software they use doesn't handle years-old topics getting new posts well. It slows down the whole forum, due to some quirk of the coding. A lot of people read these rules on forums and assume it's some facet of internet etiquette, and so they carry that baggage to sites that don't necessarily have a mechanical reason to discourage old threads being revived.
Is this one of those forums?
But this is interesting; I saw the interview with the guy in the hospital (normal size, of course) where He talk about the experience. I think that It was very very painful.
Was this a text interview or a video interview? The one thing we're missing -- terrible though it must have been to endure -- is any sort of imagery.
WOW. That is amazing to hear the first-hand account -- and they went through all those extra details and showing what 100psi looks like...I can't believe they spent 5 minutes on that story!
Female british reporter describing it! ;)
I don't get the objection to old posts being bumped at all either. I don't know how we'd find stuff if it got fragmented.
Anyway, there is a video interview of the NZ (I think?) man in hospital but he's deflated by then. Obviously not something people want to go through in real life (although... :-) ) generally. I actually find a slightly different aspect of this disappointing and interesting. One is that both of these real inflations are subcutaneous, which probably means the anal and oral inflations are more likely to be fatal, and ther are also reports of these. Accidental inflation is of course more likely to be subcutaneous. The disappointing aspect to me is that in the man's case the skin on his head seems to have inflated, so the less popular inflations of body extremities are sadly probably the most realistic. There is no natural border between the hands, feet, head and the rest of the body if inflation is subcutaneous.
It must be like rip off the skin, same pain or worst.
Not necessarily. The skin is not completely attached or we wouldn't be able to move. The space underneath is sometimes occupied by fluid.
I remember when this story came out. :-) I read about it in the Daily Mirror newspaper.
IN FACT, I STILL have that newspaper cutting! :-) It's a bit faded and worn now, but if anyone's interested I could probably get a scan or something.
And although some question the validity of this story the Daily Mirror article does have a photograph of an X-Ray the doctors took, and they have shown an outline of what a normal thigh should look like compared to what her's looks like (and yes, it is quite noticable! :-) ).
I'll dig it out some time...
(Also, in the Daily Mirror article says that doctors could only find one other such incident on record. It would be intereting to see what that other incident was).
A scan or picture of that would certainly be interesting.
I'll have a look for it ASAP. :-)
I'll have a look for it ASAP. :-)
Hi everyone,
I've actually FOUND the cutting itself. It's a bit tattered and rather brown, but still alright. :-)
BUT I am having difficulty uploading it for some reason.
You see, when I tried to scan it my computor stores the scan has a PDF Document, and although I've set up a new account with Photobucket (which I've used before to show pictures on other forums) I cannot upload a PDF Document onto that site for some reason. :-(
The only thing I can think of that can get round this is if I took a picture of it with my Digital Camera and uploaded that onto Photobucket (again, I've done that before).
The only problem with that option, however, is (a) if I take a photo of the WHOLE cutting I might end up loosing some of the resolution/detail in it (such has the text, which might be too small to read, etc), and (b) I could take TWO photos of the cutting each one of a half of it.
That way I'll maintain it's resoloution and details, but it will then be spread out over two photos.
I'll give that a try and let everyone know how those options came out.
Have you thought of taking a screenshot of the PDF and uploading that?
I've finally got round to it, you'll be glad to hear. :-)
I've devided into three segments. The first is a picture of the article has a whole, whilst the last two are two close-ups (top and bottom) of the same article.
(Sorry if the text is a bit blurred, but don't worry-Inflate123 has written the EXACT text from the article WORD FOR WORD above, so you can read that instead. It's exactly the same).
http://s1334.photobucket.com/user/LX-47/media/DSCF0596_zpsafc5d08c.jpg.html?sort=3&o=2
http://s1334.photobucket.com/user/LX-47/media/DSCF0600_zpsacb4b37a.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1
http://s1334.photobucket.com/user/LX-47/media/DSCF0601_zpsa100969e.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0
That last one is of interest. The picture on the bottom left shows an X-ray, and (apparently) a diagram showing the extent of the inflation (although, considering this is the press reporting, it's accuracy is probably questionable...:-P).
Thank you for finally corroborating my story after all this time! :) I had never seen the news clippings, just saw wire reports upon which the news clippings were probably based.
I've finally got round to it, you'll be glad to hear. :-)
I've devided into three segments. The first is a picture of the article has a whole, whilst the last two are two close-ups (top and bottom) of the same article.
(Sorry if the text is a bit blurred, but don't worry-Inflate123 has written the EXACT text from the article WORD FOR WORD above, so you can read that instead. It's exactly the same).
http://s1334.photobucket.com/user/LX-47/media/DSCF0596_zpsafc5d08c.jpg.html?sort=3&o=2
http://s1334.photobucket.com/user/LX-47/media/DSCF0600_zpsacb4b37a.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1
http://s1334.photobucket.com/user/LX-47/media/DSCF0601_zpsa100969e.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0
That last one is of interest. The picture on the bottom left shows an X-ray, and (apparently) a diagram showing the extent of the inflation (although, considering this is the press reporting, it's accuracy is probably questionable...:-P).
.
Incredible! i was thinkink that anyone remember Samantha Munns, i love this gilr! She prove me that i can be a balloon, i insert a syringe in my belly button to feel that sensation, but with air.. was amazing!
I saw the article back then in the Weekly World News; since it was coming from the WWN I thought it was complete bogus.
Thank to Inflate 1,2,3 I found back a story I did based arond the WWN story. I shamelessly retranscripted and reshaped to underline the fetishist angle - Back then it was much more difficult to found this sort of stories as you know, and harder to verify them so I let myself use it without a second thought as it was for my private silly fallacies.
Samanatha Muuns's name was barely untouched in my version, with apology to her since I really thought her stories was a complete fabrication.
If you want to read my take on this incident, it's on my DA gallery:
http://doctorbo.deviantart.com/art/Blown-up-like-a-balloon-Complete-news-coverage-368625110
I should post it here as well ;)
I dunno, I still think it's a hoax.
No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.