Why Did This Woman's Blood Produce A Toxic Nerve Gas?

it's Halloween and chances are many of you have been indulging in some scary movies over the last few weeks maybe some of you have plans to watch some scary movies tonight maybe you'll be in bed by eight I don't know I'm not here to judge a popular sub-genre of horror films is known as body horror which plays off of our fears of losing control of our own bodies um either the aliens like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or technology like the fly or to the thing in the thing or the stuff in the stuff or the blob and you get the idea the idea that our own bodies or the bodies of those around us could be weaponized in some way is a deep instinctual fear there's a reason why the Trope of you know patient gets wheeled into the emergency room and infects the entire staff with a mystery illness thing gets used so much and yet in February of 1994 this actually happened a woman got wheeled into an ER and the minute a needle pierced her skin she emitted a toxic poison that made people around her to start collapsing to the floor this is the somehow 100 true story of the toxic lady a mystery that doctors and scientists have been struggling to explain ever since February 19 1994 was just like any other day for the staff of Riverside General Hospital a car accident or two a drug overdose an old guy complaining of chest pains nothing out of the ordinary for an L.A suburb and then at 8 15 in the evening paramedics wheeled in a 31 year old Hispanic woman who was breathing shallow and barely conscious they moved her into a space mark trauma room one and began trying to stabilize her they uh they assessed what they knew so far her name was Gloria Ramirez she was 31 years old she was being treated for cervical cancer and now for whatever reason her vital signs were crashing along with a shallow breathing her blood pressure was dropping fast her heart was beating too fast for the chambers to fill with blood so they gave her lidocaine and britillion to control her rabbit heartbeat as well as Ativan Valium and versed help sedate her at this point hospital staff were pouring into the room to try to get her situation under control including RN Susan Kane resident Julie gorchinski and the head of emergency Umberto a respiratory therapist named Maureen Welch used an Ambu bag on her to help her breathe but nothing they did seem to work Ramirez's Vital Signs continue to plummet to the point they had to use a defibrillator to restart her heart when they cut off her shirt to apply the paddles they noticed a kind of oily Sheen covering our body that seemed to give off a fruity garlicky smell the RN Susan Kane took a blood sample for analysis and she noticed that the blood kind of smelled strange this is actually not that uncommon for chemotherapy patients but the chemo scent is usually a bit more putrid this had more of an ammonia smell to it even weirder after she drew the blood she noticed on the vial they were like small Manila colored particles floating around in the blood sample and this is where things get really weird because she barely had a chance to even say anything about it before she literally fell to the floor saying her face felt like it was burning unable to even stand the staff had to put her on a gurney and whisk her out of the room but as she was being whisked out gorchinski started to feel lightheaded she left the room to go to the nurse's station and kind of get her head together when one of the nurses asked if she was okay and she just fell to the floor and began to shake uncontrollably barely able to breathe at about the same time Maureen Welsh fell to the floor back in the trauma room and her arms and legs were like stiff and uncontrollable this was officially the breaking point in the head of emergency Roberto Ochoa ordered the ER evacuated nurses and doctors immediately scrambled to will their patients outside in the parking lot where they kind of set up a makeshift temporary outdoor Trauma Center Ochoa and a few others stayed behind to try to save Ramirez's life but they were unsuccessful she was pronounced dead at 8 50 just 35 minutes after she was wheeled in but now they had to figure out what the hell just happened so to be safe they moved her body to an isolation room and along the way one of the two orderlies began to vomit and complain that her skin was burning by the end of the night 23 of the 37 people on staff were experiencing some kind of symptom five of which were actually hospitalized Julie gorchinski got it the worst she would eventually spend two weeks in intensive care suffering from hepatitis pancreatitis and something called avascular necrosis which is a condition where the bone starts to get deprived of blood and dies off what the hell happened to Gloria Ramirez that caused her to secrete this mystery toxic substance that affected two dozen people was it the chemo medicine which he poisoned is she like an act of terrorism where somebody used her as a kind of human chemical weapon there is no shortage of theories around this event and for good reason it's it's one of the craziest medical Mysteries Ever documented one that would have Gloria Ramirez go down in history unfortunately as the toxic lady here's what we know about what happened and the best theory that's been put forth so far all right so back on the 9th of February 19th as the ER staff was treating their patients in the parking lot some of those patients being the staff themselves a team of investigators arrived in hazmat suits to search the ER they were looking for any kind of volatile toxicant that could still be in the emergency room's air one of which that they're looking for was hydrogen sulfide hydrogen sulfide is a poison that can kill somebody with one or two whiffs if it's at high enough concentrations it also tends to smell like rotten eggs that's the sulfide bed and that was also a bit of a problem because nobody really reported smelling rotten eggs when the incident occurred it doesn't matter because the investigators didn't find anything they also looked for phos Gene this is a gas that's been used in the preparation of several organic chemicals but it's also been used in chemical warfare yeah it's pretty brutal what it actually does is it tears open the capillaries and the lungs and the victims basically just drown in their own blood so that's fun luckily for everybody on staff that night that's not what they experienced and it also wasn't found in the air by the investigators that are anything else that they could use to explain it so then they examine the body still in their Moon suits to be safe they took Blood and Tissue samples and then sealed our body in an airtight aluminum crate again just to be safe these samples were then sent to the Riverside coroner he wasn't able to find anything that really stood out to him so he sent it on for more advanced testing using a computer-guided combined gas chromatograph Mass spectrometer they found codeine lidocaine Tylenol and tigon and anti-nausea medication none of which is unexpected for somebody going through chemo there were though a few things that were unexpected one of which was amine which is a derivative of ammonia this may have contributed to that ammonia-like smell that Susan Kane noticed the second standout result was nicotinamide nicotinamide is a B vitamin that's crucial to our health you can actually find it in a lot of multivitamins I've taken it myself at times so that might mean nothing but it can also be mixed into drugs like methamphetamines which could mean a whole different thing and last but not least is dimethyl cell phone and this one was interesting because it's usually used as an industrial solvent but it can be produced naturally in our bodies from amino acids that contain sulfur It usually breaks down the liver in three days so it's rarely detectable but there was a lot of it in glorious blood so this was weird but regardless it wasn't enough to kill her much less poison the rest of the ER so yeah with still no answers the California Department of Health and Human Services stepped in to investigate they assigned doctors Anna Maria osario and Kristen Waller to the case and they interviewed 34 people who were on staff that night compiled all the data and eventually concluded that wait for it it was an outbreak of mass for sociogenic illness Mass Hysteria like the dancing plague their theory was that whatever it was in the blood that had that smell triggered a panic attack that just sort of traveled around the room they cited the lack of any evidence for a poison and also the fact that women on staff suffered the most severe symptoms which sounds kind of sexist but the authors of the report were both women so yeah do it that what you will they also cited the fact that the people who responded the worst of this had skipped dinner that evening not to mention the fact that Gloria had been in an ambulance with paramedics who also suffered no symptoms even after being in close contact with her blood in a small enclosed space that is weird but still so much of this Theory just doesn't make sense first of all this wasn't a bunch of like Shrinking Violets these were experienced ER doctors and nurses they saw car crash victims and gunshots on a daily basis there's no way that a bad smell was going to make them all faint and by the way it wasn't just fainting they had real diagnosed physiological problems from this uh Julie gorchinski she lost so much bone density she had to be on crutches for six months six months that she wasn't able to work and because of this report now she couldn't collect any workers comp insurance so yeah she filed a lawsuit I think understandably so so this is when gorchinski and her lawyer reached out to Brian Anderson at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory he's actually the guy who ran the gas chromatograph tests back in March they felt like there must be something to those anomalies that were found that I talked about a minute ago he was still pretty stumped by this whole thing so he Enlisted the help of the labs deputy director a guy named Pat Grant let me just stop for a second and acknowledge that I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you here and you're probably starting to feel like you're getting in the weeds uh and we are getting the weeds a little bit and we're going to get a little bit more in the weeds because some of this is about to get really technical but hang with me this is this is really wild okay so we got this new guy Pat Grant right so he's looking at this file while he's flying to a business meeting in Washington DC new pair of eyes and all that and he notices something something that was missed before so he speculated that the labs detection of dimethyl cell phone might have actually been a slightly different chemical dimethyl sulfoxide also known as DMSO okay what the hell is DMSO DMSO is a heavy duty Degreaser it's often sold in gel form and hardware stores but it has a really interesting history so it turns out the grant used to work in a kinesthetics lab with athletes back in the day and it was actually a bit of a folk remedy for like achy muscles and joints that the athletes used to use like it actually used to be sold for that purpose but then it was kind of banned in the 1970s after some lab tests show that it could alter the lens of the eye but still you know a lot of people swore by it and let's face it when you're in pain you'll pretty much do anything to make it go away so it actually wasn't uncommon for people to just go to the hardware store and get the industrial form of it and use that to treat everything from you know arthritis muscle strains and yes cancer pain this might be the explanation for that oily Sheen that they saw all over her body in the ER also the garlicky smell and DMSO can combine with oxygen to create dimethyl cell phone which would explain why it was so high in her blood plus the paramedics had put her on oxygen on the way to the hospital in the ambulance so her blood was flush with oxygen ah see okay so the pieces are coming together now it's all making sense haha except this still doesn't actually explain the incident at all none of those chemicals are toxic in any way but this did get Grant thinking like if you could combine oxygen with DMSO to create dimethyl cell phone what other chemicals might be created with that I mean especially considering how high her oxygen levels were so he hit up the Merck Index basically a Bible of more than ten thousand biological chemical and Drug substances and yeah it turns out if you add two more oxygen atoms a dimethyl sulfone which is written out as ch3 2so2 you get dimethyl sulfate ch3 2so4 and yes we have gone from dimethyl sulfoxide to dimethyl sulfone to dimethyl sulfate thanks science okay so there's a chance that she was able to make dimethyl sulfate what is that well it turns out it's a nerve gas and it's not just a little poisonous either tests have shown that a 10 minute exposure to half a gram dispersed over a cubic meter of air can be fatal in fact it was tested as a nerve agent for war but it was never actually used it basically kills cells and exposed tissues like the eyes lungs and mouth and its symptoms include convulsions delirium paralysis and coma all of which is lining up perfectly with the symptoms from the hospital staff all right so here's where things stand Gloria Ramirez was suffering from cancer and used dsmo as a folk remedy to help with the pain she collapsed possibly from cancer-related kidney failure in the paramedics put an oxygen mask on her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital her blood became oversaturated with oxygen was mixed with the DMSO to form dimethyl cell phone which mixed with more oxygen to create dimethyl sulfate that was dissolved in her blood so the guys at Lawrence Livermore laboratory tested this Theory using a substance called ringer solution it's kind of a stand-in for blood not only were they able to get it to work at normal body temperature when the solution cooled to room temperature the dimethyl cell phone began to crystallize those crystals explain the white particulates that they found in the sample of our blood so all of this is fitting and working and coming into place but at least still one mystery which is how does this dissolve dimethyl sulfate become gaseous dimethyl sulfate has a pretty high Vapor Point around 148 degrees Celsius which is maybe one of the reasons why it was never used in combat but that is 148 degrees Celsius at one atmosphere of pressure the lower the pressure the lower the vapor point for example if you put water in a vacuum chamber and start lowering the pressure it would eventually start to boil at room temperature which is why if you're ever exposed to the vacuum of space the last thing you would experience would be the water on your eyeballs boiling off sleep tight kids okay so with that in mind when you get your blood drawn by a nurse or a phlebotomist they use one of these this is called a vacutainer which is a container filled with a vacuum so when they take your blood they stick the needle into the vein they pop the vacutainer on there and that vacuum is what pulls the blood into the tube it's it's pretty brilliant but in this one unique incredibly specific case that vacuum caused a tiny amount of dimethyl sulfate to vaporize and it poisoned 23 people could say it with me folks pressure changes everything and this provides the last ribbon and the last bow to wrap up the mystery of Gloria Ramirez the toxic Lady of course this theory has its detractors those who disagree with this Theory point out the fact that dimethyl sulfate doesn't really hit people the way that it did the staff it's really more like tear gas so while the staff didn't start to cry from the vapors they did report a burning sensation and also usually its effects take hours for it to materialize but the staff experienced it like immediately for what it's worth Ramirez's family isn't buying this Theory either they insist that she had never heard of DMSO and they requested an independent autopsy two months after she died but unfortunately by that point her body was extremely decomposed and the heart and a lot of other organs were missing also apparently what was left was contaminated with fecal matter so yikes this of course has led to a lot of speculation that the hospital was involved in some kind of cover-up maybe the wildest Theory that's been floating around is that the hospital was many manufacturing method smuggling and the V bags one of which was accidentally used on Ramirez but in the end so far anyway the Livermore Labs theory is the most accepted so far and it's got plenty of tests and experiments to back it up but still it is it's just a theory we'll likely never know exactly what happened on that weird night in 1994. luckily nothing like that has ever happened since that we know of which actually does lead me to believe the DMSO Theory um it was just such a unique set of circumstances you know everything had to be just right for it to happen and I should probably close by recognizing that at the heart of this mystery is an actual person somebody who's probably a really good person and was tragically taken far too soon and is sadly remembered for this one single weirdest thing about her life that being the way that it ended rest in peace the human body it's capable of some really weird things am I right which is why I did a whole six-part series called Mysteries of the human body which you can see over on nebula I didn't talk about Gloria Ramirez in that series but it totally couldn't fit there it would have totally fit in I did talk about people like the Elephant Man the tree man of java Robert Wadlow the tallest man in history Lucia Zarate the smallest woman in history and many others in the human Oddities episode other episodes include the weirdest plagues of all time 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,467,162

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: KQRqZokrQrI

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022