Scary AF. brrrr.

Two drops. That was 1.44g of mercury exposure. That's as much as ~300 fluorescent light bulbs. A "safe" level of mercury is considered to be 1 ppm.

This is real life horror show stuff. Mercury is a deadly Neurotoxin.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

I think her husband poisoned her

I worked at a place that used a chemical that could absorb through your skin and then react with the calcium in your bones; that's always been a disturbing thought for me

If you work with that stuff you should keep an ax handy. the moment 2 drops fall on your hand use the other to chop it off.

Another thing to keep in mind is that different forms of elements and chemicals have very different properties.

Pure elemental liquid mercury is pretty cool stuff. Lots of people (myself included) can remember playing with elemental mercury in their bare hands in chemistry classes, etc., and even that sort of cavalier use basically never resulted in cases of mercury poisoning.

In sheer statistical terms, I gather that it is relatively safe to have pure liquid mercury directly on your skin -- cupped in your hands, say -- for short to medium periods of time. Open wounds, even small ones, can make that significantly worse. Even ingesting elemental mercury generally doesn't result in too much absorption into the body, but it remains a terrible idea. Evaporation of elemental mercury even at room temperature can lead to inhalation of mercury vapor, which is drastically more dangerous. So, ventilation and environmental controls are quite important.

This organic mercury sounds like terribly nasty stuff, but fortunately people are very unlikely to be exposed to it outside of a lab or if you are a scientist who is intentionally synthesizing it.

I think it is kind of a shame that those high school chemistry type sessions of messing around with elemental mercury are pretty much gone today. On the other hand, even though the risks are lower with elemental mercury like that, the rewards aren't really all that high either. I have fun memories of messing around with the stuff, but it wasn't by any means necessary or important outside of pure academic curiosity. Better safe that sorry I guess, particularly when the extreme end of "sorry" results in horror stories like this.

That was seriously fucked up.

A friend son works at University and went through something similar. The vent hood was not working correctly and the fumes ( odorless) built up over time. He started losing his mind. His dad noticed this and took him to the hospital. They finally found the root cause but it took about 6 months for this to clear his body.
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PVC toxicity. You can leach it out by putting the exposed body part in a calcium solution.

Organo -mercury compounds are extremely dangerous even at quite low levels because they do bio-accumulate in the natural environment. Read up on Minamata Disease - caused by industrial disposal of organo-mercury compounds into surface waters that ended up in Minamata Bay in Japan. The mercury bioaccumulated into the fish and shellfish - not only neurological effects but also severe birth defects for the population that consumed the fish.