Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Toxic Death of Gloria Ramirez

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

In 1994 the body of a woman who died in a California ER somehow became toxic and sickened 24 people. To this day, no one is sure what happened. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's succinct. It's to the point It was for 60 seconds. She had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, but that's not why she was there She was brought to the hospital because her heart was Super beating. It was beating out of her chest Such that the chambers were not filling with blood Right. That was lowering the volume that her heart was pumping to the rest of her body and her blood pressure was plummeting And it was very dangerous and very strange for a 31 year old woman Right. But like you said, she had cervical cancer. So they were like, okay

Well, let's just figure this out and we'll treat her and we'll just take Life-saving measures and do what we can for and so the ER staff started working on her like they would any other patient But they were unsuccessful in bringing her back In less than an hour. She was pronounced dead by the head of the ER But it's what took place during that hour that has created a lasting mystery since February 1994 That remains unsolved to this day because by the time the head of the ER pronounced Gloria Ramirez dead The entire emergency room all of the patients and almost all of the staff had moved out to the parking lot had Evacuated the emergency room because they wanted to get as far away from Gloria Ramirez as absolutely possible

right, so The first thing that happened was they noted they drew some blood and they noticed that the blood smelled like ammonia Which is not what blood smells like. Yeah, they started looking closer and they found these crystals had solidified within the syringe in the blood They were called manila crystals. I looked for 20 minutes on what manila crystals are and couldn't find it Well, no, they were manila colored crystals. Okay. Well, that makes sense then. Yeah She the miss Ramirez was she herself was emitting an odor on her breath It was they described it as garlicky and fruity and then her her body

Was seemingly covered in an oily sheen, right? So so far that's not too bad or whatever But the first big problem that they had aside from those flecks and her blood the syringe full of blood Was that the the nurse who had drawn the blood? Fainted in the ER, which is pretty unusual But even more unusual is that the nurse that she handed the syringe to Also fainted staggered out of the room sat down at a nurse's station desk and just slumped over dead away Also super weird, but it got even weirder a third nurse and then ultimately a fourth nurse all fainted

passed out one of them started retching from nausea all Seemingly because of gloria Ramirez something was happening with gloria Ramirez and her body that was making the ER staff sick And this was highly unusual and that's about when they evacuated the ER to get everybody as far away from gloria Ramirez as possible Yeah, in the end 23 of the 37 people on staff in the ER had at least one odd symptom Ranging from tremors to apnea One of them even was in intensive care for two weeks. Yes pancreatitis hepatitis

Like weird things. It's like an x-files episode basically. Yeah, that one nurse had all all all of those were in one nurse Hepatitis pancreatitis and something called a vascular necrosis Which is where the bone becomes starved of oxygen and starts to die and this was concentrated in her knees This is not supposed to happen when you're just you know administering Routine life-saving measures to somebody who's having atrial fibrillation Right. So what they did was they said, let's Seal the body in a bag Let's seal that body bag and an aluminum box and let's then seal that in a room until hazmat can get here, right?

hazmat arrived that night and They said, you know when we go to check this out We assume we're gonna find some kind of toxic gas because everyone's getting sick here, right and it got even weirder when they Discovered that gloria Ramirez was not emitting any kind of toxic gas. Yeah, they expected to find something like sewer gas maybe something coming from the ER and not necessarily gloria Ramirez or Fosgene gas which can produce all sorts of horrible symptoms as well And they found nothing not just on her body Nothing in the bag nothing in the box that they sealed her in nothing in the room. There was just nothing and yet

She had made 23 of the 37 emergency room staff sick So something had happened, but now they're like, okay We've got a modern medical mystery on our hands. Should we take a break? I think we should. All right. We'll be right back On the podcast hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it It's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever

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And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you Oh man And so my husband, Michael Um, hey, that's me Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step Oh, not another one Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy

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brought on by kidney failure, which was brought on by this cancer Right But everyone's getting sick, so they said we need to up our game here and bring in, uh, Quincy Pretty much They brought in someone from Lawrence Livermore National Labs and they had better equipment And they were basically charged with sampling tissue and sampling blood and finding out just what had happened to her Yeah, and so they found a lot of stuff that they expected to find, but they found three things that stood out to them One was, uh, amines, which are a metabolite of ammonia

Uh, another thing called nicotinamides, which is a B vitamin that you sometimes find in drugs because it can produce euphoria And drug dealers will use it to extend their supply some Um, and the third one is dimethylsulfone, which is a metabolite of an amino acid That the body is usually capable of breaking down, so it's an unusual thing to find Even though it's found in the body, it's usually broken down and wouldn't have shown up on a test Which means that there was a lot of dimethylsulfone in Gloria Ramirez's body Yeah, and that's what they honed in on, uh, the amines they said was probably from breaking down from some drug that we gave her Because we were giving her cocktails of drugs to try and stabilize her

We weren't, but the ER was The, uh, the second one they said, well, this is quite a leap in my opinion That suggested maybe she was using PCP Even though they didn't find any PCP in her system But at any rate, they decided to focus on the third one, the dimethylsulfone Which seemed to make a little bit more sense than the other two at least Right, and I mean like, it was, it was written off much less easily than the other two So it was the one that was kind of left over

And one of the researchers at Lawrence Livermore said, hey, dimethylsulfone That's a type of sulfur with a single oxygen bond But hey, get this, if you add two oxygen molecules to this type of sulfur You get dimethylsulfoxide And that's something that people use as like a topical pain reliever Maybe Gloria Ramirez was using this dimethylsulfoxide as a topical pain reliever Because didn't you say that her skin was oily? So maybe that's where it came from

And everyone said, hey, that's great, but still there's nothing toxic That could knock out an entire ER from dimethylsulfone or dimethylsulfoxide Yes, but they said, oh, some chemical nerd stood up and said But get this, you add four oxygen molecules And it's just crazy how a couple of molecules can make something deadly Yeah, really But you add four and you're going to get dimethylsulfate And that is a substance that, if it's in gaseous form, can kill you in 10 minutes

Right And they went, oh, okay, this makes a lot more sense Because there can be a burning sensation, there can be tissue death And the eyeballs and mucous membranes, it can lead to paralysis and coma and convulsions And suddenly it starts to come into form a little bit Right, so Lawrence Livermore went to the coroner of Riverside, California And said, here's what we think, we can't prove this, but here's the best theory we've come up with Gloria Ramirez was using dimethylsulfoxide, DMSO, as a topical pain reliever for her cervical cancer

And when she was brought in for heart failure, the paramedics and the ER staff started flooding her system with oxygen Well, that oxygen, combined with breaking down dimethylsulfoxide, managed to combine into dimethylsulfate And that turned into some sort of gas that emitted from her that poisoned the ER staff And everybody said, okay, good enough, that's the best anyone's come up with Kind of, I mean, that was a decent theory, but they couldn't show the exact pathway that that might have taken And why her body would have converted that sulfone into sulfate It was a good guess, but they couldn't prove it necessarily And they still can, it's still unproven, but some people say, well, no one's ever demonstrated how it happened

But this is probably what happened, say a lot of people And the symptoms didn't exactly match because we mentioned some of the doctors and nurses suffered nausea and retching And apparently sulfate doesn't produce those symptoms And nobody said, my eyes burn or my mucous membrane burns Which would be like the primary symptom and everybody in the room would have it If one person was affected from being in close quarters with Gloria Ramirez, that's just what would happen first And so the symptoms not matching And then on top of that, the fact that Gloria Ramirez's family said she never used DMSO

Right Kind of shoots some holes into this theory And the fact that this has remained a mystery has allowed some other ideas to kind of float to the surface too Yeah, mass hysteria, which is, I think that's just a go-to anytime something happens, you can't explain to a lot of people Yeah, but it was particularly sexist too, because they were like, look, it was mostly female nurses who were subject to this So of course it was mass hysteria Right, of course And then this one is really interesting to me and also not true

But an urban legend arose that on the hospital staff there were some people smuggling ingredients for methamphetamine manufacturing Through the ER and IV bags, so a little breaking bad operation going through there And that one of the staff accidentally gave her an IV bag with these methamphetamine ingredients And that produced this toxicity Yeah, pretty interesting stuff And probably not the case, but it's still, I mean, you can float interesting ideas like that because it's still not proven Agreed It may never be

Well, that's the case of the toxic corpse of Gloria Ramirez May she rest in peace And since I said may she rest in peace, that means that this short stuff is over, right Chuck? That's right Well, short stuff, out! Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works