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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

> excess vitamin D and hypercalcemia (excess Ca, calcium) are both unrelated to the wife's spiking of his drinking water with potassium

The wife's -alleged- spiking with potassium. When noticing this apparent contradiction, it could lead to two conclusions: A. the wife is not telling the truth or B. the husband is not telling the truth. For some reason you're following only lead B.

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In one of the Chinese-language posts, the author says the police found calcium in the water at 9x the max drinking water concentrations (960 mg/l), and posts water test results and receipts for calcium. According to the author, they were drinking 6 l of water per day to try to fix their hypercalcemia, so they were consuming 5760 mg of calcium per day. The recommended dose of calcium is 1000 to 1200 mg per day and the tolerable upper intake is 2500 mg per day, so the author was consuming more than double the maximum tolerable upper intake. When calcium is taken in excess it causes hypercalcimia.

Also, calcium has a metallic taste, which is what the author was complaining of. So it all checks out, if one assumes the wife lied about the potassium and it was actually calcium.

(Also, the video allows us to pretty much rule out that the author is poisoning themself.)

I didn't read that post. I was going by what was claimed by the wife in the dialogue in the end of the post above. In that post the husband doesn't seem to challenge the claim made by the wife that the substance put in his water bottles was potassium, so I assumed that the claim was probably true. If it wasn't, then obviously what I say above is irrelevant since it's all premised on the substance being potassium.

> I was going by what was claimed by the wife in the dialogue in the end of the post above.

Yeah. Why??? Why on Earth would you???

Yes, the wife could be trying to set herself up to claim that she was mislead/mistaken about the substance she was "supplementing" her husband's diet with.

Creepy story no matter how you read it, though.

To be clera, the wife sounds creepy as all hell and spiking the water of someone with heart and kidney trouble with potassium could be considered a murder attempt. e.g. kidney patients are advised to avoid KCl as a salt substitute because of the danger of hyperkalemia that can lead to fatal heart attack.

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