Every Town - Riverside, CA - The Toxic Woman - Gloria Ramirez

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Riverside, California (1994) – The “Toxic Woman”:  Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Death of Gloria Ramirez In a previous era, the word ‘toxic’ primarily refered to poisonous waste, substances and chemicals. In recent years, the definition of the word has evolved to describe something very unpleasant and unacceptable, that causes harm and unhappiness. So a person, a relationship, a work atmosphere, a culture, or a social media platform can now be labeled as toxic. In fact, Oxford Dictionary declared ‘toxic’ as 2018’s “Word of the Year” for it reflected the ethos, mood, or preoccupations in 2018. But did you know that 23 years ago, American woman Gloria Ramirez from Riverside, California was nicknamed by the media as the “Toxic Woman?” She allegedly emitted noxious fumes from her body and blood that caused fainting spells and illnesses among 23 medical practitioners in a Riverside hospital’s emergency room. Eventually, the “Toxic Woman” died, and certain interesting conspiracy theories surround her death, considered a major medical mystery.💥 Watch This Episode On Youtube Here: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries💥 Exclusive Content Here: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 💥 More Creepy Podcasts From Us: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scary-mysteries/id1273612861💥 Contact Us [e-mail]  Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between.

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In a previous era, the word toxic primarily referred to poisonous waste, substances, and chemicals. In recent years, the definition of the word has evolved to describe something, very unpleasant, and unacceptable that causes harm and unhappiness. So a person, a relationship, a work atmosphere, a culture, or a social media platform can now be labeled as toxic. In fact, the Oxford Dictionary declared toxic as 2018's word of the year, but reflected the ethos, mood, or preoccupations in 2018. But did you know that 23 years ago,

An American woman named Gloria Ramirez from Riverside, California, was nicknamed by the media as the toxic woman. She allegedly emitted noxious fumes from her body and blood that caused fainting spells and illnesses among 23 medical practitioners in a Riverside hospital's emergency room. Eventually, the toxic woman died, and certain interesting conspiracy theories surround her. her death, considered to be a major medical mystery. Hi, I'm Andy Fitzgerald and welcome to another fascinating podcast of every town.

This week's episode will unravel one of the most baffling medical cases that has ever been encountered in a hospital emergency room. The death of cancer-stricken Gloria Ramirez was the most tragic moment that night in February of 1994. But what happened to the many of the many of the men. any ER frontliners briefly exposed to the so-called toxic woman has become a medical mystery like no other. The following is a comprehensive account of that exceptional incident. Any woman diagnosed with cancer at a young age would feel the world crumbling down on them.

What could be much worse than knowing that the life-threatening disease has already reached an advanced stage? Will there still be hope for recovery? will it be worth battling out? Riverside California native Gloria Ramirez became all too familiar with the scenario when in January of 1994 at 31 years old she found out that she would be facing an incredible battle late stage cervical cancer. Suddenly Gloria had to contend with mental and emotional anguish while enduring physical pain and discomfort. The diagnosis rocked the once steady marriage she shared with her husband and her 12 and 9-year-old children from a previous relationship.

The beautiful life of Gloria, who was described by family friends and churchmates as a friend to all, bringing comfort and joy to others through her quick smile and carefree humor, drastically changed. And on one fateful night, Gloria's life tragically came to an end. On the evening of February 19, 1994, just six weeks after receiving her cancer diagnosis,

Gloria complained of difficulty breathing and an irregular heartbeat. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, she was rushed to the Riverside General Hospital in Riverside City in the southern part of California. On the way there, inside the ambulance, Gloria was administered oxygen and intravenous fluids. Around 8.15 p.m., she was wheeled into the emergency department

and was brought to a small curtain space marked trauma room one. She was fully conscious at the time, but she sometimes responded to questions incoherently. The signs of struggle were unmistakable. Her breaths were shallow and rapid, and her heart was beating too fast to allow its chambers to fill completely, so her blood pressure was plummeting and her pulse was racing. The ER medical staff were informed of Gloria's late-stage cancer. As part of the standard protocol in Gloria's case, the medical staff injected her with a host of fast-acting drugs such as Valium and Antiven to sedate her and agents like lidocaine and bertilium to stabilize her

abnormal heartbeat and blood pressure. Unfortunately, the cocktail of drugs proved insufficient to alleviate Gloria's symptoms, so respiratory therapist Maureen Welch forced air into the patient's lungs through an ambi bag, which was placed over Gloria's nose and mouth, serving as a sanitary alternative to maltamouth resuscitation. But Gloria responded poorly, so the staff decided to defibrillate her heart with electricity. When they removed her shirt to apply voltage to her chest, the most bizarre emergency room mystery started to unravel. And the witnesses, seasoned and experienced medical personnel themselves,

couldn't fathom what had transpired. In order to restore Gloria's heartbeat, applying a defibrillator to her chest was perhaps a final and desperate attempt. As the medical staff pressed, padded electrodes against her chest, They noticed something odd. Her body was covered in a greasy sheen, and her mouth gave off a fruity and garlicky odor, which wasn't altogether alarming, but definitely strange.

Registered nurse Susan Kane, tasked with extracting blood from Gloria for analysis, swab the patient's right arm with rubbing alcohol, inserted a catheter, and attached a syringe. The second strange thing inside the ER happened at this point. As blood filled up the syringe, Nurse Susan smelled an ammonia-like odor

coming from Gloria's extracted blood, which respiratory therapist, Moraine, also detected. I thought it would smell like chemotherapy, the way the blood smells putrid when people are taking some of those drugs, Maureen said. But Gloria hadn't undergone chemotherapy treatment yet. Aside from the distinct smell of ammonia, the blood also contained a wash of straw-colored crystals when the vial was swirled around.

Maureen handed the vial to medical resident Dr. Julie Gorsinski and Dr. Umberto Achoa, the attending physician in charge of the ER. Both doctors agreed it was strange indeed, but before they could further analyze the blood sample, the third unusual turn of events that night happened. The usual frenetic but orderly emergency room became a center of chaos. Nurse Susan turned toward the trauma room door, swayed, and fainted on the scene. She managed to complain of feeling her face burning before she was put on her gurney and taken out. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Kortinski felt nauseous and left the trauma room to sit on a chair.

But she too slumped down on the floor. The medical resident was experiencing the symptoms of apnea, a condition in which the person will shake intermittently, stop breathing for a few seconds, then take a few breaths and stop breathing again, repeating the pattern over and over. In trauma room one, it was respiratory therapist Maureen's turn

to feel the inexplicable symptoms her colleagues had experienced. She remembered hearing someone's scream and when she regained consciousness, she couldn't control the movement of her limbs. What followed were complaints of several ER staff of feeling ill, so the hospital administrators declared an internal emergency and evacuated all emergency room patients and staff to the hospital parking lot. However, Dr. Echoa stayed behind and headed a skeleton crew but desperately tried to save Gloria Ramirez's life, but to no avail.

The cancer victim's blood pressure continued to drop, and her pulse grew fainter. Dr. Ochoa and three others repeatedly administered electric shocks and drugs, but their efforts to stabilize Gloria failed. Sadly, at 8.50 p.m., the physician pronounced her dead. Two staff members moved Gloria's body to an adjacent isolation room. While tragedy struck, trauma room one, panic and fear dominated, in the parking lot as hospital staff treated patients and sick colleagues under dim lights. They stripped down to their underwear and bundled their clothes and plastic bags out of concern

that the stricken staff were contaminated with toxic chemicals. A vocational nurse, who helped take Gloria's remains to the isolation room, began retching, felt a burning sensation on her skin, so much so that she too was laid out on a gurney. That brief but seemingly out of this world incident at the Riverside General Hospital, accounted for one death and 23 staff who fell sick, five of whom were hospitalized overnight. Dr. Gortinski had the worst case, requiring a two-week stay at the intensive care unit

because she was suffering not only from apnea, but also hepatitis, pancreatitis, and a vascular necrosis, a condition in which bone tissue is starvation, of blood and begins to die. Her avascular necrosis attacked her knees, restricting the doctor to crutches for months. The vocational nurse was likewise stricken with apnea

and required 10 days of hospitalization. How could mayhem with such scale erupt within a period of just 45 minutes? Was the illness of the Riverside General Hospital emergency room staff connected to Gloria, the ill-fated cancer, victim. The strange occurrence quickly caught the attention to the media, becoming the talk of the town. The surreal incident gained notoriety as one of America's most baffling medical mysteries in recent

history and eternalized the late Gloria Ramirez as the toxic woman. The news all over the papers, radio, and television about the emergency room catastrophe captured the public's imagination. The frightening possibility that a human body was, body, dead or alive, could release toxic fumes, triggered an extensive forensic investigation that involved medical detectives from 10 local, state, and federal units. The first to respond at 11 p.m. on the evening of the incident was a Riverside County Hazardous Materials team, which was tasked with detecting and eradicating poisonous chemicals lurking in the ER, though the source of the toxic fumes was undoubtedly Gloria Ramirez.

To the relief of the hospital personnel, the hazmat team found neither the rotten egg-smelling hydrogen sulfide that can cause death when whiffed, nor fosgene, a chemical weapon that tears open capillaries in the lungs and drowns its victims in blood. Since the careful search of the hazmat team ruled out the presence of any toxic chemicals or pathogens inside the ER, the Riverside Coroner's Office took on the task of performing an autopsy on. Gloria's body. Geared in air-type protective suits, the pathologist at the post-mortem in a sealed examining chamber and emerged 90 minutes later with blood and tissue samples, along with air from the body bag, an aluminum crate holding the body. Strangely, the coroner's office withheld its findings, as it still hadn't discovered anything remarkable several days after performing that autopsy.

Thus, it solicited help from an independent entity, an obscure outfit called the Forensic Science Center at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory situated about 60 miles east of San Francisco. The center was established shortly after World War II to build nuclear arms, but after production of nuclear weapons dwindled, the site was turning into a forensic center in 1990. It became a clearinghouse that allowed state and federal law enforcement forensic teams to avail of advanced assistance from Livermore and Department of Energy Scientists. On March 25, 1994, the Riverside Coroner's Office shipped Gloria's autopsy samples to Livermore's Forensic Science Center. But on April 12th, the center informed the coroner's office that its analysis hadn't found anything that looked like poison. The center's director, Brian Anderson, said there clearly was something unusual going on, but nothing that could have killed Gloria or caused the emergency room staff's symptoms. Anderson wondered, how could I spend this much time and not find anything?

The pressure to disclose the toxic woman's autopsy results mounted, so on April 29th, coroner Scotty Hill announced through a press conference that Ms. Ramirez had died of cardiac dysrhythmia triggered by kidney failure caused by her cervical cancer. With that, he'll close the investigation on Gloria's death, but set a solid explanation and not been identified linking the outbreak of illness among the ER personnel to Gloria, nor how any external toxic substances would have contributed to her death.

Thus, the Riverside County Health Department called in Caled California's Department of Health and Human Services for further investigation. It sent its two top scientists, Dr. Anna Maria Osorio, and Dr. Kirsten Waller, who interviewed the 34 ER staff who had worked the night shift on February 19th. The result of their inquiry determined that the ER medical personnel who experienced the symptoms were those who worked closely with Gloria Ramirez. particularly those who helped resuscitate her and handled her intravenous lines were the ones at high risk. Interestingly, the interviews also indicated that more female than male staff,

and those who had an empty stomach versus those who had had dinner that evening, exhibited loss of consciousness, shortness of breath, and muscle spasms. Taking into consideration the hazmat examination, autopsy results, and interview findings, the health department issued an official report on September 2nd. The hospital staff most likely experienced mass hysteria. It was a spad of mass sociogenic illness triggered by the nauseating fruity-garlicky odor that emanated from Gloria, the toxic woman,

which caused stress and anxiety among the medical staff. Doctors Osorio and Waller backed up their mass hysteria theory by citing the absence of poisonous evidence and that women mostly exhibited the symptoms. The doctors pointed out that both were hallmarked signs of mass hysteria. Furthermore, none of the ambulance workers who were in contact with glory that evening showed any signs of the mysterious illness, perhaps because they were no longer at the scene

when the first people had started feigning. Dr. Osorio and Dr. Waller, however, considered the possibility that some substance poisoned emergency room staff who would work directly over Gloria. For some, this mass hysteria explanation was sufficient, but it angered the professional and experienced emergency room workers at the Riverside General Hospital. It was unacceptable and an insult to their profession and professionalism. They had been exposed day in and day out to various severe medical cases for years, years, only to get hysterical because of a heart attack? The report was widely denounced

in the emergency room staff who had attended to Gloria were not going to back down. One of the more vocal critics of the report was medical resident Dr. Julie Gorsinski, who together with her lawyer, Russell Kusman, decried the mass hysteria conclusion. She pointed to her stint in the ICU battling serious illnesses after the incident as evidence. The lawyer said the report may have been based on politics or ignorance, but certainly not on science. Eventually, Dr. Gorkinski filed a lawsuit against Riverside General Hospital, the coroner's office, and several others seeking $6 million in damages. On the other hand, respiratory therapist Maureen Welsh, channeled her anger about the mass hysteria theory by imploring, Brian Anderson,

director of Forensic Science Center in Livermore, to take a look at the case more closely without any vested interest. She sent Anderson, all the coroners and toxicology reports, legal briefs and news stories surrounding the case. At Livermore, forensic analysis discovered large amounts of painkillers in glorious system, which is lidocaine, Tylenol, codeine, and Tygin,

which any cancer patient would likely take. But when Anderson reviewed the files, the one thing that particularly struck him was a speculation in the autopsy report about the source of the garlicky odor and the oily sheen in Gloria's body, DMSO, or demethyl sulfoxide. It's a solvent used as a powerful degreaser

sold in gel form at hardware stores can be externally applied as a remedy for pain and aid. Just a brief background about this seemingly little-known solvent. It's a wonder drug in the mid-60s because of its remarkable healing powers, easing and tractable pain and reducing anxiety. But DMSO was rejected by the FDA when studies showed it could ruin human eyesight. Yet it still gained underground followings over the decades, especially among athletes and people who suffer from arthritis,

and muscular strains. Along with a risk to eyesight, another downside, is that DMSO leaves a garlicky taste and odor. In 1980, the FDA warned physicians to advise their patients against self-medicating themselves with DMSO gel. Most likely, Gloria desperately wanted to relieve the excruciating physical pain that came with cancer,

so she resorted to DMSO's temporary remedy. It was absorbed by Gloria's body and penetrated into her bloodstream. So how did Gloria's use of DMSO as a pain reliever escalate to catastrophe in that emergency room? The gel-leg solvent DMSO that eases physical pain is relatively harmless with doctor-regulated use. But it is just one oxygen atom short of DMSO2 or dimethyl cell phone. DMSO can react with oxygen and convert to DMSO2, an organic sulfur compound that occurs naturally in some primitive plants and is present in small amounts in many foods and beverages. So DMSO2 isn't lethal, right? But here's the catch.

When a couple of oxygen atoms are added to it, it becomes DMSO4 or demethyl sulfate. which is a truly toxic chemical. Domethyl sulfate can kill cells and expose tissues in the eyes, mouth, and lungs. When its vapors are absorbed into the body, DMSO4 causes convulsions, delirium, paralysis, coma, and delayed damage to the kidneys, liver, and heart. It is deadly. How did the relatively harmless dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, found in glorified? his body transformed to become the toxic de-ethyl sulfate or DMSO4.

While Gloria was inside that ambulance en route to the hospital, she received pure oxygen through a mask. The DMSO she applied on her body was oxidized and became DMSO2, which was still unhazardous at that point of the reaction. This explains why the paramedics and the ambulance didn't suffer the symptoms that the ER staff did. But how did the chemical reaction continue on into the emergency room? The mechanism by which DMSO was converted to the noxious DMSO4 is still just a theory and has never been replicated, however it's worth considering.

The Livermore scientists believe that the conversion was caused by the chilled air temperature of the emergency room. Then the electric shocks of the defibrillator delivered to Gloria could have facilitated. the conversion into DMSO4, which in turn caused the illness of the ER personnel. Livermore experts posited a novel and somehow believable theory, but not everyone was satisfied. Organic chemists dismissed the theory since direct conversion of DMSO2 to DMSO4 has never been observed. Others believe that the ER staff symptoms didn't match the symptoms of DMSO4, or poisoning, and its known effects takes several hours to show up after initial exposure,

not minutes. Moreover, Gloria's family vehemently denies that she ever used DMSO at all. The Ramirez family's pathologist was unable to determine a cause of death because Gloria's heart was missing. Her other organs were cross-contaminated with fecal matter, and her body was severely decomposed by the time the pathologist conducted the examination. More theories concerning the toxic woman case sprouted. One of the more outlandish ones discussed on the internet was that the ER incident in Gloria's death were the result of alien abduction. Ufologists cited Gloria's unusual reaction with the

ER staff as proof of extraterrestrial intrusion. Another theory related to the distinctive ammonia smell that her body emitted in the ER, it posited that Gloria could have been exposed to precursor chemicals like methylamine used in the production of methamphetamine, a potent stimulant mainly used as a recreational drug that produces strong ammonia-like odors. The theory said that hospital workers involved in the production of methamphetamine were smuggling the chemical in intravenous bags

and I'm mistakenly given one to Gloria. Still, it was a Livermore Forensic Laboratory theory that the Riverside Coroner's Office endorsed and later published in the journal Forensic Science International. Gloria Ramirez was buried on April 20, 1994, 10 weeks after her death, at Olivewood Memorial Park in Riverside, California. Decades later, the bizarre incident surrounding her death

remains a medical and chemical mystery. Until the scientific community has unanimously settled the debate on the February 19th, 1994 Riverside General Hospital emergency room case, Gloria will forever be known as the toxic woman. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown.

Tune in next week for another one filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories, and who knows, Maybe your town will be next.