Maxwell Kruzic said he was in such “crippling” stomach pain on Oct. 5, 2023, that he had to pull off the road twice as he drove himself to the emergency room at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, Colorado. “It was the worst pain of my life,” he said.
Kruzic was seen immediately because hospital staff members were pretty sure he had appendicitis. They inserted an IV, called a surgeon, and sent him off for a scan to confirm the diagnosis.
But the scan showed a perfectly normal appendix and no problems in his abdomen. Doctors racked their brains for other possible diagnoses. Could it be a kidney stone? Gallstones? Here was a 37-year-old man in agony, but nothing really fit.
The peppers measure over 2 million Scoville heat units on the spiciness scale, he noted, compared with a jalapeño at up to 8,000 or a habanero at 100,000 to 350,000.
Then, someone asked what Kruzic had eaten the night before. He said he’d consumed tacos with some hot sauce that he’d made from a kind of scorpion pepper, grown from seeds he ordered from a chile pepper research institute.
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The peppers are among “the world’s hottest, incredibly hot,” Kruzic said. “Delicious.” He loves spicy food and had never had a problem with it, but apparently this was just too much burn for his digestive system.
Kruzic spent much …