According to various news sources, it seems that American Idol contestant Fantasia Barrino has been hospitalized in Charlotte, NC for aspirin and sleep-aid poisoning.  The LA Times blog reports that Fantasia’s overdose coincides with the public announcement of her boyfriend’s divorce from his wife.  Fantasia’s boyfriend, Antwuan Cook, is a cell phone salesman whose wife Paula claims to have sex tapes of her husband and Fantasia together, which has helped fuel her case for divorce.  As you can see in the picture below, Fantasia has publicly demonstrated her zeal for being a home wrecker by tattooing Antwuan Cook’s name on her chest.

So what about the aspirin overdose? Was this some public demonstration against Paula Cook’s sex tape accusation? Was this a cry for help, or maybe even a suicide attempt?  Is aspirin toxicity even dangerous?

Well, some of these questions may never be answered, but aspirin can definitely be dangerous.  Toxic levels of aspirin occur starting at doses around 150 mg/kg of body weight.  For Fantasia, this would probably be somewhere around 9000 mg, or 25 regular strength tablets or 18 extra strength tablets.   The symptoms she might have experienced that prompted her to seek medical attention would typically be nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain, sleepiness, dizziness, and/or ringing in her ears.  Severely toxic patients experience seizures, brain swelling, and respiratory failure.   Aspirin toxicity is treated fairly easily with activated charcoal and sodium bicarbonate, but some cases are still lethal — about 2%.   For more general info on aspirin poisoning, see the wikipedia article.

Tags: celebrities, overdose, tattoos

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.