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

It's Halloween and chances are many of you have been watching some horror movies over the past few weeks, maybe some of you have plans to watch some horror movies tonight, maybe you're in bed by eight. Don't know. I'm not. Here, to judge a popular subgenre of horror films known as body horror, which plays on our fears of losing control of our own bodies, whether it be aliens like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or technology like the fly or the thing in the thing or the things in the thing or the mass and you understand the idea that our own bodies or the bodies of those around us could be used as weapons in some way is a deep instinctive fear, there is a reason why the trope of you know, the patient gets She is wheeled to the emergency room and infects the entire staff with a mysterious illness.

This thing is used a lot and yet in February of 1994

this

actually happened, a

woman

was wheeled into an emergency room and the moment a needle pierced her skin, it emitted a

toxic

poison that made people around her will begin to collapse to the ground

this

is the somehow 100% true story of the

toxic

lady a mystery that doctors and scientists have been struggling to explain since February 19, 1994 was like any other day for the staff at Riverside General Hospital a car accident or two a drug overdose an elderly man complaining of chest pains nothing out of the ordinary for a suburb of Los Angeles and then at 8:15 p.m. the paramedics brought in a 31-year-old Hispanic

woman

breathing shallowly and barely conscious, they moved her into a trauma room and began trying to stabilize her.

They evaluated what they knew so far. Her name was Gloria Ramírez. She was 31 years old. She was being treated for cervical cancer and now, for some reason, her vital signs were failing. with shallow breathing, his

blood

pressure was dropping rapidly, his heart was beating too fast for the chambers to fill with

blood

, so they gave him lidocaine and britillion to control his rabbit heartbeat, as well as Ativan Valium and Versed , they helped sedate her. At this time, the hospital staff. were entering the room to try to control her situation, including RN resident Susan Kane, Julie Gorchinski, and ER chief Umberto, a respiratory therapist named Maureen Welch, used an Ambu bag to help her breathe, but nothing What they did seemed to work.

Her vital signs continue to plummet to the point that they had to use a defibrillator to restart her heart. When she cut his shirt to apply the lollipops, they noticed a kind of oily sheen that covered our body and seemed to give off a fruity garlic smell. Registered nurse Susan. Kane took a blood sample for analysis and noticed that her blood smelled a little strange. This is actually not that uncommon in chemo patients, but the smell of chemo is usually a little more putrid and had more of an ammonia smell. Even stranger after taking it out.

The blood she noticed in the vial was like little Manila colored particles floating in the blood sample and this is where things get really weird because she barely had a chance to say anything about it before literally falling to the ground saying the face of her. I felt like I was on fire, unable to stand it, the staff had to put her on a stretcher and carry her out of the room, but as they were carrying her out, Gorchinski started to feel dizzy, he left the room to go to the nurses' station and something like that.

She came back to her senses when one of the nurses asked her if she was okay and she just fell to the floor and started shaking uncontrollably, barely able to breathe, around the same time Maureen Welsh fell to the floor in the trauma room and her arms and legs legs were stiff and uncontrollable, this was officially the breaking point in the ER chief. Roberto Ochoa ordered the emergency room to be evacuated. Nurses and doctors immediately rushed their patients outside to the parking lot, where they set up a makeshift temporary outdoor Ochoa Trauma Center. and a few others stayed behind to try to save Ramírez's life, but they were unsuccessful.

She was pronounced dead at 8.50, just 35 minutes after she was wheeled away, but now they had to find out what the hell she had just happened to, so to be safe they moved her. body to an isolation room and on the way one of the two nurses began vomiting and complaining that his skin was burning at the end of the night 23 of the 37 staff experienced some type of symptoms, five of which actually Julie Gorchinski had the hardest time, eventually spending two weeks in intensive care suffering from hepatitis pancreatitis and something called avascular necrosis, which is a condition in which the bone begins to lose blood and die.

What the hell happened to Gloria Ramírez that made her suffer? secrete this mysterious toxic substance that affected two dozen people, was it the chemotherapy medicine that he poisoned? Is she like an act of terrorism where someone used her as some kind of human chemical weapon? There is no shortage of theories about this event and for good reason it is one of the craziest medical mysteries ever documented, one that would make 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 forward so far, all good, as of February 9.

On the 19th, while the emergency personnel were 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 emergency room, looking for any type of volatile toxins that I could still be in the emergency room. air, one of the ones they were looking for was hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is a poison that can kill someone with one or two inhalations if it is in high enough concentrations. It also tends to smell like rotten eggs. That's the sulfur bed and that was also a It was a little problematic because no one reported smelling rotten eggs when the incident occurred.

It doesn't matter because the investigators found nothing. They also looked for phosphorus. Gen. This is a gas that has been used in the preparation of various organic chemicals, but it has also been used in chemical warfare, yes, it is quite brutal, what it really does is open up the capillaries and the lungs and the victims basically They drown in their own blood, so it was fun, luckily for all the staff that night, that's not what they experienced and the investigators also didn't find anything else they could use to explain it, so they examined the body still in their suits. moles to be sure, they took blood and tissue samples and then sealed our body in an airtight container.

Aluminum case again just to be sure, these samples were sent to the Riverside Coroner. He couldn't find anything that really caught his attention, so he sent it for more advanced testing using a computer-guided combined gas chromatograph. Mass spectrometer. I found codeine, lidocaine, Tylenol, tigon, and anti-nausea medications, none of which are unexpected for someone going through chemotherapy, although there were a few things that were unexpected, one of which was amine, which is a derivative of ammonia , which may have contributed to that ammonia-like sensation. Smell that Susan Kane noticed. The second notable result was nicotinamide. Nicotinamide is a B vitamin that is crucial for our health.

In fact, you can find it in many multivitamins. I've taken it myself on occasion, so it may not mean anything, but it can also be mixed. in drugs like methamphetamines which could mean something completely different and last but not least is cellular dimethyl and this one was interesting because it is usually used as an industrial solvent but can be

produce

d naturally in our bodies from amino acids that contain sulfur. it breaks down the liver in three days so it's rarely detectable but there was a lot of it in the glorious blood so this was strange but it still wasn't enough to kill her let alone poison the rest of the ER, so yeah, no answers yet.

The California Department of Health and Human Services stepped in to investigate, assigned doctors Anna María Osario and Kristen Waller to the case and interviewed 34 people who were on staff that night, compiled all the data and finally concluded that it was a mass outbreak for sociogenic diseases Mass hysteria like the dance plague, their theory was that anything in the blood that had that smell triggered a panic attack that simply traveled around the room, they cited lack of evidence of a poison and also the fact that the female staff suffered the most severe symptoms, which sounds a little sexist, but the authors of the report were both women, so yeah, do it, they also cited the fact that the people who responded the worst to this They had skipped dinner that night. 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, which is strange, but still much of this theory just doesn't hold water. meaning at the beginning.

After all, this wasn't a bunch of shrunken violets, they were doctors and nurses with emergency experience, they saw victims of car accidents and gunshots on a daily basis, there was no way a bad smell was going to make them pass out, and by the way, like that was. Not only did they faint, they had real physiological problems diagnosed from this, Julie Gorchinski, lost so much bone density that she had to use crutches for six months, six months, that she couldn't work and because of this report she now she couldn't. collect any workers' compensation insurance, so yeah, she filed a lawsuit, I think that's understandable, so that's when Gorchinski and his lawyer contacted Brian Anderson at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he's actually the guy who did gas chromatograph tests in March, they felt that there must be something to those anomalies that were found that I talked about a minute ago.

He was still quite perplexed by all this, so he requested the help of the deputy director of the laboratory. A guy named Pat Grant let me stop for a second and acknowledge. which I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you here and you're probably starting to feel like you're getting into the weeds uh and we're getting into the weeds a little bit and we're going to get a little more into the weeds because some of this is about to get very technical, but stay with me, this is really wild, so we got this new guy, Pat Grant, so he's looking at this file while flying to a business meeting in Washington DC.

A fresh pair of eyes and all that and he notices something that had been overlooked before, so he speculated that the detection of dimethyl on the cell phone in the lab might actually have been a slightly different chemical: dimethyl sulfoxide, aka DMSO, okay? What the heck is DMSO? DMSO is a heavy-duty degreaser often sold in gel form and in hardware stores, but it has a really interesting history, so it turns out Grant used to work in a kinesthetic lab with athletes back in the day and it was actually a remedy. popular for people like sore muscles and joints that athletes used to use as if it were actually sold for that purpose, but was later banned in the 1970s after some laboratory tests showed that it could disrupt the lens of the eye, but still so you know a lot.

Most 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 buy the industrial form. and use it to treat everything from arthritis, muscle strains and yes, cancer pain, this could be the explanation for that oily sheen they saw all over your body in the ER, also the smell of garlic and DMSO They can combine with oxygen to create cellular dimethyl. which would explain why it was so high in his blood, plus the paramedics had given him oxygen on the way to the hospital in the ambulance so that his blood was full of oxygen.

Ah, I see, okay, so the pieces are coming together now, it all makes sense haha. Except this still doesn't explain the incident at all, none of those chemicals are toxic in any way, but this got Grant thinking that if oxygen could be combined with DMSO to create dimethyl, what other chemicals could they be created with? especially considering how high his oxygen levels were, so he accessed the Merck index, basically a Bible of over ten thousand biological chemicals and pharmacological substances, and yes, it turns out that if you add two more oxygen atoms, a dimethylsulfone that is written as ch3 2so2. you get dimethyl sulfate ch3 2so4 and yes we havegone from dimethyl sulfoxide to dimethyl sulfone to dimethyl sulfate thanks to science, okay, so there is a possibility that she could have

produce

d dimethyl sulfate, what is it?

Well, it turns out it's a

nerve

gas and it's not just a little bit poisonous. Tests have shown that a 10-minute exposure to half a gram dispersed in one cubic meter of air can be fatal. In fact, it was tested as a

nerve

agent for war, but never used. It basically kills exposed cells and tissues. like the eyes, lungs, and mouth, and its symptoms include seizures, delirium, paralysis, and coma, all of which align perfectly with the hospital staff's symptoms, so here's where things stand. Gloria Ramírez suffered from cancer and used dsmo as a folk remedy to help with the pain she collapsed possibly due to cancer related kidney failure the paramedics put an oxygen mask on her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital her blood became supersaturated with oxygen it mixed with DMSO to form cellular dimethyl which mixed with more oxygen to create dimethyl sulfate which dissolved in his blood, so the guys at the Lawrence Livermore lab tested this theory using a substance called ringing solution, it's a kind of substitute for blood, they were not only able to make it work in the normal body. temperature when the solution cooled to room temperature the dimethyl cell phone began to crystallize those crystals explain the white particles they found in our blood sample, so this all fits and works and falls into place, but at least it's still a mystery: how this dimethyl sulfate dissolves and turns into a gas.

Dimethyl sulfate has a fairly high vapor point, around 148 degrees Celsius, which is perhaps one reason it was never used in combat, but that's 148 degrees Celsius in one atmosphere of pressure, the lower it is. the pressure, the lower the vapor point will be, for example, if you put water in a vacuum chamber and start reducing the pressure, it will eventually start to boil at room temperature, so if it is ever exposed to the vacuum of space, it will last thing you would experience would be the water in your eyeballs boiling until you get a good night's sleep kids okay so with that in mind when a nurse or a phlebotomist draws your blood they use one of these this is called a vacutainer which is a container filled with a vacuum, so when they draw your blood, they put the needle into the vein, they put the aspirator there and that vacuum is what draws the blood into the tube.

It's pretty brilliant, but in this one, incredibly specific case, the vacuum cleaner caused a small amount of dimethyl sulfate to vaporize and poison 23 people could say it with me pressure changes everything and this provides the final ribbon and the final tie to close. the mystery of Gloria Ramírez the Toxic Lady of course this theory has its detractors Those who do not agree with this theory point out the fact that dimethyl sulfate does not actually hit people like it did staff, it is actually more like tear gas, so although staff didn't start crying from the fumes, they did report a burn.

The sensation and usually its effects take hours to materialize, but the staff experienced it immediately. For what it's worth, Ramirez's family doesn't believe this theory. They also did not insist that she had never heard of DMSO and requested an independent autopsy two months later. she died but unfortunately at that time her body was extremely decomposed and her heart and many other organs were missing and apparently what was left was contaminated with fecal matter, so this of course has led to much speculation that the hospital was involved . in some kind of cover-up, perhaps the wildest theory that has been floating around is that many manufacturing methods and V-bags were smuggled into the hospital, one of which was accidentally used on Ramirez, but in the end, so far, of Anyway, the Livermore Labs theory is the most accepted one so far and has a lot of evidence and experiments to back it up, but it's still just a theory, we'll probably never know exactly what happened on that strange night in 1994.

Fortunately, nothing of That's been happening for as long as we know. which really leads me to believe in the DMSO theory. um, it was a unique set of circumstances. You know everything had to be right for it to happen and I should probably end by acknowledging that at the heart of this mystery there is a reality. person, someone who is probably a very good person and who was tragically kidnapped too soon and is sadly remembered for this strangest thing in his life: the way it ended, may he rest in peace, the human body is capable of doing Some really weird stuff, right? right, that's why I made a whole six-part series called Mysteries of the Human Body that you can watch on Nebula.

I didn't talk about Gloria Ramírez in that series, but she didn't fit in there at all, she would have totally fit in. I talked about people like the Elephant Man, the Java Tree Man, Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in history, Lucia Zarate, the shortest woman in history and many others in the Human Oddities episode, other episodes include the plagues strangest of all time, diseases that we cannot. It seems to heal. I haven't dedicated an entire episode to The Mystery of Aging. It's a fun series. I built him a whole set and we had special graphics and stuff.

I mean, I know I haven't promoted this in a while. here, but I'm very proud of it. I think it turned out well, but if that's not your thing, I actually have a new ongoing series called Forgotten Atrocities. It's about, you know, forgotten atrocities throughout history. There are already some episodes of that. the most recent one was about the Irish famine and those are just my exclusive projects. There are some real engineering nebula originals. Wendover Productions. Real life story. Many other of your favorite educational YouTubers. You can also watch all our regular YouTube content ad-free. before everyone can see it, nebula is a place we built together so we can have a curated platform outside the confines of the YouTube algorithm, so if you like my type of content and you haven't seen it, you should.

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