MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Medical Mishaps

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Today’s podcast features 3 unique stories about "medical mishaps." The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.Story names, previews & links to original YouTube videos:#3 -- "Side Effects" -- A healthy young man's life is turned upside down after a seemingly minor pain in his leg reveals a major problem (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joXznzIrB9c)#2 -- "Traffic" -- A seemingly harmless mistake causes problems 40 years later (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWWWMdm9ZY4)#1 -- "16 Minutes" -- What he saw during those 16 minutes drove him insane (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny_s07D-LT8)For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast features three unique stories about medical mishaps. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called Side Effects,

and it's about a healthy young man whose life was turned upside down after a minor pain in his leg revealed a big problem. The second story you'll hear is called Traffic, and it's about a seemingly harmless mistake that caused problems 40 years later. And the third and final story you'll hear is called 16 Minutes, and it's about a man who experienced something truly horrific for 16 minutes, and in fact,

it actually drove him insane. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious Deliberate in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please gift the Amazon Music Follow button one of those magic eight balls that can tell the future, but change all the potential answers to, sorry, try again. Okay, let's get into our first story called Side Effects. I'm Peter Frankopan. And I'm Afua Hirsch.

And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle, that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of

time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondery's podcast, British Scandal. On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round the world sailing race. Good on him, I hear you say. But there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also tiny little detail, almost didn't mention it. He bet his family home on making it to the finish line.

What ensued was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. On the night of October 25th, 2009, a fit, healthy 30-year-old man named Alex was at home in San Diego watching TV in bed. At some point he noticed there was a slight pain in his left Achilles tendon. A tendon is the fibrous connective tissue that connects muscle to bone and the Achilles

tendon is the biggest tendon in your whole body and it's the one you can feel on the back of your ankle that connects your calf muscle to your heel. Alex had never had tendon pain before and so he assumed it must just be tightness from the long walk he had taken that night around his neighborhood. And so after massaging it for a little while, eventually he kind of forgot about it and just kept watching TV until he fell asleep for the night. The next morning when Alex woke up, he immediately recognized that the pain in his left Achilles tendon was 10 times worse. It was blindingly painful and then his right Achilles tendon was also now starting to hurt. And so he reflexively reached under the covers and tried to massage his sore tendons.

But as soon as he touched the backs of his legs, he felt shooting pain in that area. And so he couldn't touch them anymore. And so instead, he swung his legs off the bed and he sat up on the edge of his bed. And then he slowly rocked forward until he transferred his weight onto his feet and tried to stand up. And as soon as he did, he fell to the ground because of the blinding pain in his tendons. And so he manages to pull himself back up using the bed. And then he hobbles his way out of his bedroom over to the top of the stairs. And then he grabs the railing and he carefully makes his way down the stairs. And as he's walking, it feels like the tendons are so tight, they're going to snap like a rubber band. And so he gets to the bottom of the stairs,

and he walks his way around into the kitchen, where he sits down and he kind of evaluates what's going on. And he thinks to himself, man, I must be developing a wicked case of tendinitis. Tendinitis is inflammation or irritation of the tendon. And so Alex grabbed his laptop, which was right in front of him, he opened it up and he began looking for ways to alleviate pain from tendonitis. And so after looking at a couple medical forums, he got up and hobbled his way over to the bathroom. He opened up the medicine cabinet and he grabbed the Icy Hot, which is a topical pain reliever. And then he hobbled his way into the first floor living room where he laid down on the couch. And then he applied a healthy amount of Icy Hot on the backs of both of his legs right over his tendons and then he propped his legs up

on two pillows and so he laid there and he's thinking okay so it's the weekend i have today off i'll just lay here until the pain subsides but by that evening the pain had not subsided it had gotten progressively worse and so alex picked up the phone and he called a podiatrist, which is a doctor who specializes in feet and the lower half of your leg, and he made an appointment for the following morning to have a look at his Achilles tendons. And so after he hung up, Alex thought to himself, you know, the best thing I can do is probably just go to bed. I'm bound to feel better in the morning. And so Alex hobbles his way back up the stairs, holding onto the railing, and he goes into his bathroom to wash his face. He reaches for the towel and he notices his thumb is suddenly

locked up and he can't move his thumb. And then his other thumb too locks up and he's looking at them and he can't get them to move. And so with his other fingers he tries to move that thumb and bend that thumb but he can't do it. The tendon in both of his thumbs had suddenly become unbelievably tight to the point where he couldn't move his thumbs anymore. Up until this point, Alex had convinced himself that whatever was happening with his Achilles tendons was probably minor. That with or without medical intervention, it was bound to just get better. But now he wasn't so sure because the thumb situation, that really scared him. He had never experienced anything like that and he couldn't help but think that

whatever was happening in his thumbs was probably what was happening in his Achilles, making this a much more complex problem. So Alex forgets about washing his face or even going to bed and instead leaves the bathroom and grabs the railing and hobbles back downstairs. He makes his way into the kitchen with the stiff thumbs and he sits down at the table. He opens up his laptop and he begins looking for any information about what is happening to him. A few minutes into his search, he was about to type something into Google when all of a sudden he felt the rest of his fingers start to lock up. The tendons in his fingers were tightening up just like his thumbs and just like his Achilles tendons. And so now Alex is going into crisis mode. He doesn't know what's happening to him. He has no idea what to do, but he manages to calm himself down. And he told himself,

Alex, tomorrow you got a doctor's appointment. They'll know what's wrong with you. They will fix this. Everything's going to be just fine. And so despite his overwhelming urge to panic, he closes his laptop and he hobbles his way over to the stairs. He climbs up to the second floor and he goes directly into his bedroom, crawls in bed, and he goes to sleep. The next morning when he woke up, the tightness and pain in his Achilles tendons and in his hands had not gotten any worse. And that kind of comforted Alex. He's thinking, okay, we're past the worst of this. I just need to figure out what this is and then fix it. And so he crawled out of bed. He hobbled his way over to the stairs. He went down. He grabbed a quick bite to eat. And

then he went outside to his car to head out to his doctor's appointment. When he got to his car, he reached for the door handle. And when he pulled on it, he felt an unbelievable surge of pain in the hand that was on the car. And when he looked down, all of the joints in that hand that had been pulling on the car, they had all separated. Like the connective tissue that kept his finger whole was no longer strong enough. So Alex screamed and he retracted his hand in horror. And when he looked at it, the joints had gone back to normal, but the pain in this hand persisted. at it, the joints had gone back to normal, but the pain in this hand persisted. And so on adrenaline alone, Alex managed to use his other hand and got the car door open. He went inside and then he could

barely grip the steering wheel because one hand is now wrecked and his other hand is not much better. But he managed to speed to the doctor's office. And then when he got inside, he could barely fill out the paperwork because one hand was wrecked and the other wasn't much better, so he couldn't grip the pen. But after he gave them his paperwork, the doctor finally came out and they brought him back to an exam room. And that's when Alex explained that originally it was just his Achilles tendons. That's why he had called for this appointment. But after making that appointment, not only had the pain in his Achilles gotten much, much worse, but there was also now pain and tightness in his hands including one hand that had just fallen apart when he tried to open a door alex told the doctor that he had never experienced anything even remotely resembling this in his entire life he led a very

healthy lifestyle and really had no idea what could be causing this although he did say 10 days prior he had finished a round of antibiotics. The drug was called Cipro. But previously, he had used this drug with no issues. But as a precaution, he told the doctor because he knew one of the side effects of this drug was tendon problems. And so as a precaution, Alex had actually brought the paperwork for that drug, Cipro, and he gave it to the doctor. And so the doctor, after hearing the story, he reads through the fact sheet of this drug

and he tells Alex that he doesn't think it's a side effect of the drug he thinks alex is showing all the signs of having an autoimmune disease like lupus or multiple sclerosis and that he needs to go to a rheumatologist and get tested for that and so alex is horrified by this he can't believe that only a couple of days ago he was totally normal and now it felt like his whole life was falling apart. And so he left that appointment, he went out to his car and he called a rheumatologist and he set up an appointment for a couple of days later to get tested and then he went home. And over the next couple of days as he waited for that next appointment, his condition only got worse. Every muscle, joint and connective tissue in his body was either extremely tight, or hurt, or both. By the time he made it to the rheumatologist's office,

he could barely move on his own. After the doctor had run several tests on Alex, Alex began mentally preparing himself to be told that he had an autoimmune disease. He believed at this point that that was the most logical explanation for what was happening to him. But when the test results came back in to Alex's shock, he was negative across the board. He did not have an autoimmune disease. And so Alex hobbled out of the office,

he got out to his car, he sat down, and he was in pain and at a loss. He had no idea what was happening to his body, and it seemed like none of the experts knew either. And so when Alex got back to his house, he made his way into the kitchen and he sat down to do some more research, but he felt like he was at a loss there too. He didn't even know what to research. He had searched for every possible combination of pain, tightness in your Achilles, pain, tightness in your hands and your fingers, and nothing was lining up with his

experience. And so he thought to himself, you know, even though that podiatrist ruled out the antibiotic he had taken a cycle of before he started feeling the way he was feeling, even though he ruled that out, I might as well do some more research on it because it's the one thing I can point to that was newly introduced to my life before I had all these things happen to me. And so he opened up his laptop and he typed in Cipro side effects and what he discovered horrified him. Cipro is part of a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones and while it is a very effective antibiotic, it comes with extremely severe side effects. And enough people who have taken a fluoroquinolone have suffered from these side effects that there's people who have taken a fluoroquinolone have suffered

from these side effects that there's actually a term given to them. They are said to have been phloxed. And as Alex discovered in his research, there are many online communities for these phloxed individuals, many of which used to be healthy and fit, but after taking these drugs, they became bedridden or had to transition to a wheelchair. This is due to one of the nastiest side effects of this class of drug, ruptured tendons. As a reminder, a tendon connects muscle to bone. And so if you were to say a tendon has ruptured, what you're actually saying is the muscle has torn off of the bone. And apparently, this is unbelievably painful and almost always requires

surgery to fix. And in many of these floxing cases, the fluoroquinolone drugs cause these people's tendons to start dramatically tightening until they just start rupturing. And there's nothing they can do to stop it unless they stop moving, hence becoming bedridden and transitioning to wheelchairs. When Alex read all these horrible testimonials of people who had been floxed, he realized their experience mimicked his own. He was floxed. But once he knew what he was up against, he began looking for a timeline. How long would he have these symptoms for? And what he saw was most people experience these awful symptoms for about three months and then they fade away so for three months alex suffered but he stayed positive he was certain

he was going to get better but three months came and went and he didn't get better in fact he got worse all of his tendons continued to tighten and some of them ruptured and he had to quit his job and had to move in with his parents but he he stayed positive. He went back online and he began reading about more severe floxing cases and he saw those people typically saw a big turnaround at the three-year mark. And while that was overwhelming and awful and disheartening, he at least had something to look at as the light at the end of the tunnel. And so for three more years he waited and waited in pain. He eventually became completely bedridden and completely dependent on his parents. But then the three-year mark came and went and much like the three-month mark,

nothing got better, he just got worse. And that was when Alex realized he was in the range of people that suffered from their floxing permanently. In 2016, so seven years after taking that fateful dose of Cipro, he wrote a blog post on his website updating the world about his condition. In it he says he's only gotten worse and that his life effectively came to an end in 2009 when over a six-day period he swallowed those 12 Cipro pills. And so now, all he looks forward to is his death. the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about.

No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? Okay, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right. It's stone-cold icon George Michael.

From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet join us for our new series george michael's fight for freedom from the outside it looks like he has it all but behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil george is trapped in a lie of his own making with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus Amazon Music with your Prime membership? That's right,

all your favorite Mr. Ballin episodes can be heard on Amazon Music ad-free, and you'll always be the first one to catch our new episodes. But that's not all. You get access to other amazing shows, like Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Morbid, 48 Hours, and 2020, all ad-free too. And you know what that means, uninterrupted listening, so no more cliffhangers. Amazon Music is your home for all things true crime and offers the most ad-free top podcasts, so we definitely have something for you. And it's already included in your Prime membership. To listen now, all you need to do is go to amazon.com slash ballin. That's amazon.com slash ballin or download the free Amazon Music app.

It's just that easy. Our next story is called Traffic. In 2013, 46-year-old Paul Baxter started feeling sick. And then he developed a wicked cough that got so bad over a couple of days that he could barely speak because he was just coughing the entire time. And so he went to his doctor, who quickly diagnosed him with pneumonia, and put him on a treatment plan. But after several months of being on this plan and not having his condition improve at all, his doctor referred him to a respiratory clinic. There, they did an x-ray of

his chest and they discovered a suspicious shadow in the lower right section of his lung. Doctors were concerned, especially given the fact that Paul was a long-term smoker, but before they just put him under the knife and started cutting this out of his lung, they decided they would take a probe with a camera on the end of it and run it down into his lungs and actually have a look around inside. During the procedure, which Paul was awake for, the doctor put the probe down into that shadow area in his lung and right away he saw this lump. But when he zoomed in with his camera on the lump itself, he saw there was something orange sticking out of it. And so he told Paul there were little pincers at the end of this probe,

and he was going to try to move the tissue around to try to see what this thing was, and if it was a foreign object, he would try to pull it out. But when he tried to move around the tissue to get a better look, he couldn't get it dislodged, and so he pulled the probe out, and he told Paul he would need to come back in a couple of days when he could use a longer and more powerful probe. And so Paul looks at the doctor, and he's like, well, what is it? What is this orange thing inside of my lungs?

And the doctor said, honestly, I have no idea, but it's not supposed to be in there. A few days later, Paul went back in for this follow-up procedure, and the doctor, using this longer, more powerful probe, was able to go down and actually dislodge this orange thing from inside of his lungs. And as soon as he pulled

it free, there was a camera screen that was watching in real time what this probe was seeing. And so Paul and the doctor and the other doctors that were in there as well all got to see for the first time what this thing was. It was this kind of triangular small orange thing that nobody had seen before. And so as it was getting pulled up and out of Paul's body, everyone's just watching the camera wondering what this thing is. And then finally the pinchers came out of Paul's mouth revealing what it was holding on to and nobody could believe what they were looking at. What it was holding on to was a small plastic orange traffic cone from a child's play toy set. And as soon as Paul saw it, a memory came rushing back to him and he told the doctors when he was

seven years old, he swallowed, or so he thought, a cone that looked an awful lot like this one, except he hadn't swallowed it, he had inhaled it. And then somehow for 40 plus years, he'd had no symptoms related to it until now when he developed that cough. Paul would say when he had this revelation in front of the doctors, there was a moment of silence and then everybody just started cracking up laughing because none of the doctors had seen anything like it before and didn't really know how to react to it. And so Paul was allowed to keep his traffic cone and after he left, his cough went away and he went back to normal. The next and final story of today's episode is called 16 Minutes. In 2006, 73-year-old Sherman Sizemore was the definition of a man's man.

He had spent the bulk of his adult life doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, mining for coal in West Virginia. And while he was a coal miner, he apparently had lost track of the amount of times he had nearly been killed from mine shaft collapse and gas leaks. Later on in life, after his kids had all grown up, he had retired from coal mining and become an ordained Baptist minister. And despite his harrowing backstory and burly, intimidating appearance, he was known to be incredibly gentle and very calming to his parishioners. He was also known to be an incredibly devoted grandfather, to the point where if there was a chance to spend time with his grandkids, he would basically throw all of his responsibilities out the window to do that.

But in January of that year, something changed in Sherman. He went from being this pillar in the community to being a deranged, paranoid lunatic. It all started on the afternoon of January 19th. Sherman and his wife Ruby were sitting in their home alone on the couch, just kind of doing their own things, when suddenly, out of the blue, Sherman just starts screaming as if he sees something in front of him that's terrifying him, and his scream startled Ruby so that she started screaming, and so she looks at her husband, and he's still just looking straight out ahead. He's terrified of something in front of him. And so Ruby looks from him to where he's looking and there's nothing there.

And so she turns back to her husband and she's like, what's going on? What are you screaming for? What are you so scared of? But Sherman wasn't able to speak. After he stopped screaming, he just continued to look straight out as if whatever had terrified him

had him in this trance where he couldn't look away. And so his eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his face is going white, he's starting sweat and ruby's starting to panic she has no idea what's happening with him and so eventually she just holds on to him and says come back to me come back to me and sherman at some point would he kind of broke out of his trance and he looked at his wife and he just says you can't leave me or they'll kill me ruby has never seen behavior like this in her husband ever this is a completely different person she's interacting with and so she has no idea what to do and so instead she

just kind of holds on to sherman and prays that he doesn't start acting like that again but that didn't happen all day long periodically he would just start screaming about something that ruby couldn't see. Now Ruby did consider calling 911 and getting medics out there but his behavior was so unusual and he was normally such a rock who was so competent who was so healthy that she didn't want to. She felt like he would just kind of get through this that if they can just get through today and get into tomorrow that he would be better and so she just all day was comforting him and just dealing with these episodes. And then finally they got into bed that night and Ruby's thinking, thank goodness, we're going to wake up tomorrow and things will be

better. But when she woke up the next morning, it was very obvious Sherman had not slept at all. He was looking straight up at the ceiling. He looked worse than the day before. It was obvious that he was not back to normal. And so Ruby called the rest of the family and had them come over to figure out what they were going to do. But when Sherman found out his family was coming to his house, he told Ruby they can't come inside. He was afraid they and others were conspiring to bury him alive. The only person he could be around was Ruby and his whole family had no idea what to do. Little did they know, there was actually a very specific reason he was acting the way he was. A few months before

January 19th, which was the day Sherman turned into this different person, a few months earlier, he began complaining of severe abdominal pains. And so he and his wife Ruby and his daughter, they went to the hospital, and the doctor, after examining him and running some tests, determined that most likely his pain was coming from his gallbladder. But the only way to be sure would be to do some exploratory surgery and literally look inside of Sherman's gut and look at his gallbladder and see if that was the problem. And so the doctor asked Sherman, you know, are you prepared to do an exploratory surgery or would you like to just kind of wait it out and see what happens with this pain? And so Sherman talked it over with his wife and his family and they made the decision that the pain was just too much and so they would go forward with the surgery. And so

on the morning of January 19th, so again this is the day that Sherman basically loses his mind, he goes into the hospital completely normal. He goes in with his wife, he goes in with his daughter, and he makes his way over to the surgery wing of the hospital. He says bye to his family, and he's put on a stretcher bed, and he's wheeled in and prepped for surgery, and then brought into the operating room. And while he was in the operating room, laying on his stretcher bed flat on his back, looking straight up at all these bright lights above him, he just struck up some chit-chat with the nurses and doctors who were in the room prepping the room for surgery, and they were also putting the IV into his arm. Then at some point, one of the nurses lowered the oxygen mask onto Sherman's face so the anesthesiologist could

administer the two-drug cocktail that would knock him out for the surgery. Sherman was scheduled to get something known as general anesthesia for this operation, where basically he would be completely out, he wouldn't feel anything, they'd do the surgery, and then he would wake up in recovery. And so once this mask was on Sherman's face, the anesthesiologist began pumping him full of the drugs that would make him be knocked out for the surgery. However, the anesthesiologist only administered one of the two drugs necessary for general anesthesia. He administered the paralyzing drug, but he did not administer the actual anesthetic

that would knock him out, and most importantly, would get rid of all of his pain. And so as this mask is on his face and Sherman believes he's being given the proper dosage of drugs, the nurse who was nearby told Sherman to go ahead and start counting backwards in his head from 10, knowing full well that Sherman would pass out before he reached zero. And Sherman knew this too. He had been in surgery before and so he happily began counting in his

head. 10, 9, 8, he started to feel something, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, boom, he was out. Except he wasn't. When he reached zero in his head counting down, he realized he had not passed out. He began taking mental stock of what was going on and he realized he could completely feel his body. But when he tried to move his body, he couldn't. He was completely paralyzed. When he tried to make a sound, he couldn't because his vocal cords were also paralyzed. The only thing he could move were his eyes. He could move them left and right. However, they had taped his eyes shut so he can't see anything. And so Sherman is thinking to himself, okay, you know, I've been given the drugs. Maybe they're slow acting. Any minute now, I'm going to drift off to sleep and this will just be a distant memory. But after a few seconds he's hearing the doctors and nurses in the room, he

can't see them, but he hears them. They seem to be moving towards doing this operation and he's still awake. And so Sherman becomes frantic and starts flicking his eyes left and right as fast as he possibly can. And the rapid eye movement actually loosened the tape on both of his eyelids and it created a tiny slit that he could actually look through. And what he saw terrified him. The surgeon was walking over next to him. He was getting his gloves on. And then the surgeon says, scalpel. And the nurse hands him this chrome metallic blade. And the surgeon takes the blade and begins cutting into Sherman's midsection. takes the blade and begins cutting into Sherman's midsection. Sherman felt everything, but Sherman couldn't do anything about it. All he could do was rapidly flick his eyes left and right in hopes

one of them would see that he was awake, that he was feeling this. But no one was paying attention to his face, so they didn't see his eyes moving around. And so the surgeon continued to cut into his midsection until he had cut out a fairly significantly sized hole, at which point the surgeon hands the scalpel to the nurse and says, clamps, at which point the nurse hands him what looks like a torture device. And the surgeon proceeds to use these clamps to pin segments of Sherman's skin that has just been cut open to his body to basically keep the hole open and then the surgeon began tugging on the outsides of this hole in sherman's midsection making sure it was big enough

that he could actually get a good look into his body and every little tug is sending lightning bolts of pain into sherman's body but again all he can do is flick his eyes left and right and no one's paying attention scope the surgeon called out for, and the nurse handed him a camera that he jammed into Sherman's gut. And then the surgeon said, suction, and the nurse got what looked like a vacuum and pressed it inside of this open wound and began sucking out fluids from his body. The pain Sherman was experiencing is unimaginable. Every second felt like an eternity. Forceps, the surgeon called, and the nurse handed him these metal prongs that he put inside of this hole in Sherman's body,

and he used them to dislodge his gallbladder so he could get a better look at it. By this point, Sherman wanted to die. He was no longer flicking his eyes left and right. He was just looking straight out, hoping someone would finally see him. And someone did. One of the nurses standing next to the surgeon looked up at Sherman's face and saw Sherman looking back, terrified at the nurse. At which point the nurse yelled out, stop, he's awake, he's awake. And the surgeon practically faints and he looks over at the anesthesiologist and he calls him, get over here and fix this. And so the anesthesiologist comes running over from the side of the room. He gets up next to Sherman

and begins pumping him full of painkillers. And as he's doing this, he has this moment of clarity. He remembers he didn't give him the anesthetic. And so as these new painkillers that have just been introduced begin to take their effect, Sherman's eyes go from being terrified to glazed over and he does pass off to sleep. And so now he's out and he can't feel anything. But now the anesthesiologist and the medical team realize

they have a very big problem. This patient just experienced 16 minutes of surgery and felt all of it. And at the end of it when he wakes up he's going to remember it and he's probably going to file a lawsuit against the hospital. And so a decision was made. It's unclear if the anesthesiologist acted alone or if the entire team was in on this, but regardless the anesthesiologist administered an additional drug after giving all these painkillers. This additional drug was called midazolam, but it's better known as the amnesia drug. And like its nickname implies, anyone who gets it will forget what has just happened to them. And so the idea was by giving him this amnesia drug, he won't remember the trauma he had suffered through

during the surgery and so wouldn't file a lawsuit. And so after he was given this drug, the medical team, they went back to doing the surgery, they completed it, they got him back out to recovery. And then when Sherman woke up in recovery, he did not remember what had happened to him inside of the operating room, at least not consciously. Those horrible 16 minutes had been implanted on Sherman's subconscious. Basically, his body recognized that he had experienced extreme trauma. However, the amnesia drug wiped away the memory of how he received that trauma. So there's this big disconnect in his memory. And so when Sherman came to in the recovery room, he immediately sensed something was horribly, horribly wrong. He was scared. He was anxious. He had this incredible sense of dread, but he had no memory to tie these feelings to.

And so as Sherman is sitting in recovery, he must have tried to kind of hide the way he was feeling because he didn't even remotely understand it. He had been completely happy and normal going into the surgery. And now a couple of hours later, he's a complete mess. And so he leaves the hospital that day on January 19th. He goes back to his house and he sits on the couch with his wife. And as he's sitting there, suddenly these horrible feelings he's having, they become too much. And he basically has a panic attack and he starts screaming out and he's terrified of something, but he doesn't know what it is. And then over the next couple of days, he began having these flashbacks where he would access the actual 16 minutes of torture he went through. But when he

would see someone cutting into him and opening his chest up and sucking things out of it, he didn't think that happened to me and that's why I feel this way. Instead, he thought it was just this horrible nightmare that he couldn't escape from. And so his family did eventually start getting doctors and psychologists and all these people involved to figure out what was wrong with him. But before they could figure it out, the whole situation had just become too terrible for Sherman. And so on February 2nd, just two weeks after he came out of that surgery, he would take his own life. His family was unbelievably heartbroken. It didn't seem real that this had happened. And so they would continue to dig and dig and figure out what went wrong. And they would finally get their hands on the medical report from the gallbladder exploratory

surgery on January 19th. And after giving it to another doctor to look over, this doctor discovered that Sherman had in fact experienced 16 minutes of something known as anesthesia awareness, where you are awake or feel a portion of your surgery. And shockingly, this happens to 20,000 people a year. However, Sherman's case, forgetting the amnesia drug, just literally what he went through, 16 full minutes of this really intensive surgery that he felt, that is an absolute rarity. That does not happen very often. Sherman's family would go on to sue the hospital, and they would be awarded an undisclosed amount of money from the hospital in 2008.

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