Cancer Survivor Says Super-Hot Sauce Helped Diagnose Malignant Brain Tumor

Tasting one of the world’s hottest hot sauces knocked an Orland Park man on his butt and into a seizure — and the sauce may have saved his life, too.

Randy Schmitz was vacationing with family and his fiance in Myrtle Beach, SC, last summer when he took the Pepper Palace Flashbang challenge, sampling a sauce made of habanero, Carolina reaper and scorpion peppers. The mix is so hot, customers must sign a release before tasting.

Schmitz immediately fell to the ground in a seizure and blacked out.

After waking up in a hospital, doctors told the 30-year-old man he had a brain tumor.

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“The next thing I knew I had woken up on a stretcher in a hospital room, covered in vomit,” Schmitz recalled in a letter he wrote to the Pepper Palace. “It turns out that I had the first) seizure of my life. ... After getting an MRI, it was found that I had a cancer brain tumor, and it is likely that this sauce activated it.

“I want to say “THANK YOU. I really believe this hot sauce giving me the seizure ended up saving my life!!!!!”

The doctors told him that it’s very possible the hot sauce “activated” the tumor.

“If you have a lot of hot sauce and you’re sweating a lot, people can have dehydration and it can cause seizures,” Jeffrey Raizer, medical director of neuro-oncology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, told the Chicago Tribune. “If you eat a habanero pepper, it’s a big jolt to your system.

While he may eventually have discovered the tumor, it’s possible the cancer would have grown until that day passed. He left Myrtle Beach, headed home and a few days later underwent surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Doctors removed a 2.5-inch by 1.5-inch malignant tumor, reports the Tribune, and Schmitz was treated with radiation and chemotherapy.

“I am now cancer free,” he wrote in his letter, now posted on the Pepper Palace website. “Your Flashbang Pepper Sauce SAVED MY LIFE!!!!”

Of course, when he was on the ground convulsing, Schmitz’s mother suspected the hot sauce was killing him. She ran into the store and yelled at the employees.

“She wants to say she is so sorry and she too is so grateful that this saved my life,” Schmitz said.

Schmitz works at AERO Special Education Cooperative in Burbank and is now a newlywed.

The Pepper Palace, in appreciation for his letter and to celebrate both his wedding and cancer-free condition, sent Schmitz a year’s supply of hot sauce, including some Flashbang.

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