The Medical Detectives - Sleuth Stories: Gloria Ramirez AKA The Toxic Lady

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

In this Medical Detectives Sleuth Story Anna tells Dr. Nance the baffling case of Gloria Ramirez, known as The Toxic Lady. In 1994, Gloria was rushed to a California ER where 27 of the 37 staff members treating her fell ill, some requiring hospitalization, after exposure to her body. Despite autopsies, hazmat investigations, and decades of speculation, no conclusive explanation has ever been proven. Was it a tragic chemical reaction, a hospital cover-up, or something even stranger? As Anna walks Erin through the eerie timeline and competing theories, they unravel the science, sexism, and unanswered questions behind one of medicine’s most chilling unsolved mysteries.

Today is going to be a little bit different, Erin, because we are switching rules. Ooh, I love a switcheroo. So I know we've done this once before, but we are doing it again, which is we're bringing back a story from history. And you're going to try to figure out what it is. You're going to play me. Except a much more informed me. All right. Well, I make no promises, but let's do it.

Okay, so let me paint a picture for you, okay? It's February 9, 1994, 8.15 p.m. Paramedics are rushed to a semi-conscious, 31-year-old Gloria Ramirez, and she heads into the emergency room at Riverside General Hospital in California. 45 minutes later, Ramirez was dead. and 27 out of the 37 ER staff were ill after being exposed to her body. Some people becoming hospitalized in the following days. Despite the autopsy and forensic investigation that followed her death,

there has been no conclusive answer for the toxic mystery. And I'm supposed to solve it? Yep. That's it. Yep. All right. You know, it's only a mystery that's been, you know, Well, at this point, 31 years old, gosh, yeah, this is fascinating because, yes, the story is about Gloria, but it's also about the people that got sick treating Gloria.

And I think that's something we've really talked about on the podcast yet as well is the being a hospital staff, the burden, and the chance you might get exposed to something like this. So let's talk a little bit about Gloria. Gloria Cecilia Ramirez was a 31-year-old mother, too. and she had been diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer. And she was receiving palliative care at her home on the night of February 9th. And this has been 1994, as we mentioned earlier, and she started experiencing like the shortness of breath and a rapid heartbeat. Her boyfriend calls 911, and he said that she's been nauseous, she's vomiting all over the last few days.

So when the ambulance arrives, Gloria is already in acute distress. And they quickly get her into the ambulance. they hooked her to a monitor and they administered oxygen and got her started on an IV right away. This all sounds pretty like what you would do when someone calls an ambulance. Yeah, they take your vitals. They see if there's anything they can do right at the scene, which usually includes starting what's called a large bore IV and putting in called supplemental oxygen. But really the paramedics job is to stabilize and get the patient to the nearest facility where, advanced life-saving measures can be taken place.

Yeah, I mean, I've always heard it on this podcast and just in life, is that like, their job is just to get you there and not dead. So when she's wheeled into the emergency room at Riverside General Hospital in California, she can only respond with brief and sometimes incoherent responses. So she's just, blah, blah, blah, like kind of gibberish talking. Her heart's beating so incredibly fast and her blood pressure is also completely tanking. And she's only able to take these shallow, rapid breasts. You know when you're like hyperventilating, you're like, like that.

So she's in there with all of this happening. The medical staff injects her with diazepam, medazalam, and lorazepam to try and sedate her. And they also treat her with lytocaine and brittium while pumping air internal lungs with an ambu bag. So that sounds like a lot. Is that normal? Can you kind of walk us through your thoughts on the symptoms and this initial treatment? Well, those medications like the Medazalam and whatnot, those are to relax the bodies so that you can do an intubation without fight. So the ambu bag is they haven't put anything down her throat yet.

They are putting the mask and then someone is physically pumping air into your lungs as opposed to the machine, which is what an initial. intubation does. You put a tube down and you hook it up to a respirator so that a machine physically do it. But if you look at a respirator, you'll see it's a pop. It's going up and down and up and down, as opposed to an ambu bag, which is someone manually going up and down. Why would you use an ambu bag over an intubation? It's much easier to go from an ambu bag to nothing, right? So if someone is not eminently dying as opposed to to do an intubation, you have to medically make them be asleep. And so there are times when they just are so sick that you go straight to intubation. You're going to give them medication so that they are completely relaxed and then you do the

intubation versus the ambu bag. I'm assuming she still probably was coherent and with it and still able to take some breath. and so they're really just supporting her breaths as opposed to taking over her breaths. Okay, so all of this is going on and she's not responding to any of the treatments. So the staff attempt to defibrillate her. So they remove her shirt and they notice,

this is wild, an odd, oily sheen on her body. Any ideas? I have no ideas. Well, it wasn't just oily. It was also stanky. It was also not good smelling. It smelled like fruity and garlicky, which to me sounds not great. So she's basically got this oily sheen on her body and it smells fruity and garlicky.

Yeah, I will say that when people who are, for example, diabetic, they give off what's called ketones. And their breath usually smells sweet. So there are clues to smells that. we hone in on. So like fruity and garlicky, that order coming from her mouth could be ketones. I don't know. Usually when I heard of people talk about ketones, it's usually described as sweet. And I don't think I have heard of garlicy as an adjective to describe anything that I know. So they decide they need to draw blood for analysis. And the nurse, Susan, cane swabs Gloria's arms with rubbing alcohol and puts in a catheter okay as the syringe is filling

Susan notices a chemical odor from the blood so now we got the oily body we got the garlically sweet breath and we've got chemical smelling blood and and it thought crossed my mind and I guess this is you can confirm this Aaron potentially I would say that you get used to blood smelling a certain way, right? You are in contact with it so much as a medical professional, especially if you do surgery, that I'm guessing that when it doesn't smell correctly, it would be pretty obvious. I mean, to be honest, when you are drawing blood, it's a closed system. So I don't even know how the blood would have an odor to it because it's going from your vein through a needle into a plastic tube.

So that seems even stranger that there even was an odor to the blood. That you could smell through all the plastic. Correct. Okay, so Susan is obviously perfected by this, and she hands the syringe to Maureen Welsh, who's a respiratory therapist, who noted that the blood smelled like ammonia.

Instead of what they would have expected based on her stage four cancer, like a chemotherapy smell that was typical of a cancer patient. So not only does it have an unusual smell, it's not the unusual smell they would have expected with a cancer patient. So then, you know, they're still all perplexed, and they're basically playing past the vial of blood or syringe of blood, because then they hand it to another person. They hand it to the medical resident whose name was Julie. Gorsinski, Julie, I hope I got your name correct, who noticed strange, like, manila-colored particles floating around in the blood. Any idea on particles floating in blood? When does

that happen? What causes it? Well, the blood, when you draw someone's blood, it is more than just the red blood cells that live in the blood. There is something called plasma. And plasma is kind of the fluid that lives in between the blood cells. So you can have like high fat content in your, like people who have really, really high cholesterol. When you draw their blood, you can see the cholesterol. You can have high metal content in your blood. And it's not as if you'll see like actual pieces of metal, but it will change the consistency of the blood. so the blood can look a bit different.

The viscosity of the blood can be different. So there can be a lot more inside. I mean, there's microplastics in our blood. There's a whole lot more than just the cells. Okay, so now Gertinsky's like, this is weird. So she gets the attending physician. This is now the fourth person that's stared at this. Dr. Umberto Ochoa, who also notices.

the ammonia smell and the kind of manila floating particles in it okay so we've got four people who all confirm this smell and this floating manila globs in the blood okay Susan turns to leave the room and just because there's been a lot of names susan was the first person who got the person who actually took the blood sample she turns to leave the room and she starts swaying like she's losing her balance and doctor Ochoa grabbed her before she fell and basically helped her straight to a gurney and Susan starts to feel like her face is burning and she's rushed out. Then Gorginski, that would be person number three that touched this file, is now starting to feel crazy and also has to leave the room to rest at the

nurse's desk. So two out of the four people are already going down from just interacting with this blood draw. And when somebody goes to check on Gorkinski, she's literally slumped to the floor, like she's lost all her energy. Then she wakes up and she begins shaking and she experiences apnea where she'd stop breathing for a couple seconds. Have you ever seen anything like this, Erin? No. There are toxins that in very, very small, like very small, very small. exposures can have very serious effects, you know, like anthrax or things that are neurotoxins, that the smallest exposure can be deadly. So even things like, for example, ketamine, there are sometimes the first responders when they are trying to revive someone who's

overdosed on ketamine, they can have a reaction to ketamine if even just the smallest amount of ketamine is transferred to them. So I have no idea what this exposure is, but it seems like some type of either like chemical or environmental toxin, but I still know clip. So we've lost two nurses already, or a nurse and we've lost two practitioners. There's a blanket term. And shortly after all of this, Marine Welch, number two on the vial, also collapses. And she's quoted as saying, I remember hearing someone, then I woke up and I couldn't control the movement of my limbs. That is horrifying to literally pass out, wake up, and now you can't move your arms.

What causes something like that? Can I talk to do that? This seems, this sounds to me like some type of neurotoxin. Some people remember there's like a very famous Simpsons episode where. Homer eats the blowfish, right? But there was a very specific part where you're not supposed to eat and he eats it. And I think he like, you know, fake dies. But yes, you can have exposure, again, to this very, very small neurotoxin that can shut you down immediately.

Because it would attack your brain and your brain would attack your bodily functions. The nervous system. Yeah. It goes like straight to the nerves. Wow. So after Welch collapsed, several other staff members said, they felt ill and the ER declared an emergency. So Dr. Ocoa, he's also feeling ill and he orders the staff to evacuate all the emergency

patients to the parking lot. So they've literally moved the entire emergency room out into the parking lot. And if it was hard to get a space at that hospital before, it is nearly impossible now. So a smaller crew then stays behind to help Dr. O'Coa in the effort to stabilize Gloria. Okay. So they're using electric shocks and other drugs, but their efforts are failing. And she's declared dead. And I do want to take a quick second and just acknowledge what a tragic death this was for Gloria's family. Even though she did come into this situation with stage four cervical cancer, they were not anticipating her passing. They fully expected that she had a

lot more life to live. So this was really something that hit her family and Gloria completely out of the blue. And I think when we're talking about stories where people related to the individual are still alive, before we get into the nitty-gritty of the details, it really is important to just acknowledge their suffering. And, you know, very rarely do people prepare for death. And when that happens, especially in mystery situations, it is very challenging. So two workers moved Gloria's body into an isolation room and then everyone exited to the parking lot. Sally Baderas, one of the nurses who helped move Gloria into the isolation room, guess what happens to her?

She starts to feel like her skin is burning and she too begins vomiting. She was helped onto a gurney in the parking loft where the nurses and doctors continued giving medical support to patients and other staff members who were now sick. Everyone who's been near Gloria stripped their clothes off

for fear of being affected by toxic chemicals in the air. Here's the thing. And I'm just a genuine question for you. I get you can take off her clothing. Again, this bunch of doctors make it in the parking lot is all I can see in my head. But isn't it still in your hair? Isn't it still under your fingernails? It's kind of, you have to understand what the mode of transmission is.

So when we talked about COVID, for example, and why you had to wear the N95 is because it was airborne transmission. When we talk about HIV and AIDS, that is blood-borne transmission. So you have to protect yourself via the mode of transmission that whatever this virus or bacteria or toxin or something is occurring. Right now, I still don't know if it's airborne or if it's something that's physical touch. And we call that the clothes would be considered a fomite, a fomite. a fomite is a non-living piece of clothing or structure that transmits the virus or toxin. So your clothes may be a fomite, the bed may be a fomite, the phone may be a fomite, the phone may be a fomite, your doctor's white coat might be the fomite.

So, yeah, you want to eliminate as many possible vectors of transmission. Okay. So all of this is going on. People are taking off their clothes and the parking lot. They're trying to treat everyone. Somehow, Dr. Okoa is still fine, or at least not feeling it at the level of everyone else. But all the other nurses are out as well as the person that helped move Gloria. Okay. So at around 11 p.m., a specially trained hazmat team combs through the ER for traces of whatever toxic substance they can find. But they can't find anything. There's nothing there that would indicate. this result, right? Five staff members were hospitalized. So that includes Susan Kane, Julie Gridsensky, Morin Welch, who are the first three people to touch the vial, and Sally Bauderas, one of the nurses that moved her, okay? Sally Bauderis was hospitalized for 10 days

and experienced the same apnea issues that Julie Gridsensky first experienced. And Julie, she had the most severe symptoms. she had to detoxify in an intensive care unit for two weeks. She suffered from apnea, hepatitis, and a vascular necrosis, which I don't even know what that is, but I'm guessing vascular is vein and necrosis is death. So deaths of the veins of some sort? Well, usually it's called avascular necrosis, and that means that there's either a part of, like, you know, in orthopedics, you have your hip, right? you have the bone. The bone is dead because of lack of blood supply. So we call that

avascular, no blood supply, necrosis, death. Okay, I was close-ish. It still means that the blood vessels are involved. It just means that there's no blood going through those blood vessels to the end organ. Okay, so it's like death by lack of blood. Correct. And basically she had these crutches for months following the incident. Yeah, that makes sense. She probably had a vasculine acrosis at the hip. You say that so casually, like it's just a thing. So basically blood flow to her hip cut off and therefore her hip doesn't work. But can you reverse that and get the bone to grow back? Sometimes, but sometimes you will have to either do surgery to put some hardware in there to kind of reinforce the bone. And sometimes you have to do a hip replacement.

Wow. That's wild to just go in from treating someone and then the next thing you know, you've got all of these horrible things, like pancreatitis, hepatitis, like those aren't fun things to just pick up and have. No, no. Can you talk a little bit more about how those specifically affect the body? Because I've heard them before, but what happens when you have hepatitis and pancreatitis? Well, pancreatitis is an inflammation of the pancreatitis. which is one of those we call retroperitoneal organs or organs that live in the back of your back, so up against kind of your spine. And pancreatitis is very, very painful, very painful. The pancreas is responsible for a lot of the digestive juices that you have that help break down kind of fats.

And so that in particular, like any time you are eating, it's extra painful because it's being activated. So that's what pancreatitis. And then hepatitis, your liver is your body's natural detoxifying organ, right? So that's what the liver's job is, is it's part of clearing out and cleaning out your blood of toxins. So sometimes the liver can be overwhelmed with toxins, and that's why it's not working. And then sometimes the liver itself, right, why do alcoholics, they die of cirrhosis. That's cirrhosis of the liver. So their liver has just been overwhelmed by trying to clear out all of these toxins, and that's how people get cirrhosis.

Okay, so this is basically the worst. She is living a very, very rough life, recovering from all of this. So, of course, everyone's kind of flabbergasted. What's happened? You know, multiple people have now been affected. Multiple people have gone through really significant treatment and recovery, and they still don't. know what it is. So they do an autopsy and a toxicology test. And it's performed by a team of pathologist from the Riverside Coroner's office. And it's in irritate suits and they're in a sealed

examining chamber because everybody's terrified of having this happen to them. And they took samples of blood, tissue, and air from the body bag. But they're still unable to find anything conclusive. I have to say this is I just got off the phone today with a college friend. of mine who is a forensic pathologist for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, you know, like all CSI type stuff. And she was telling me that, and I did not know this, the coroner is an elected position. What? Yes. I was like, what? And I guess I just, I was unfamiliar with how, you know, I knew like the medical examiner is a doctor, but the foreigner is she said is usually someone who is in law enforcement and they are an elected official or someone who's

appointed by the government to handle these cases. So I was, I just had this conversation with her today and she was educating me on the process. Right. Her job is to collect the fingernails. not to test the fingernails. That's kind of the coroner's job. But the NE, their job, is to try and determine the cause of death from a medical standpoint. Oh, we're going to go deep down a hole of medical conspiracy now. Was the coroner paid off? Is that the mystery here? Anyway. So they didn't find anything inclusive and they just go on to say that our cause of death was just cardiac arrest, brought on by renal failure. So one of the things that's really interesting about this

autopsy is that, yes, it noted that renal failure was the cause of death, but that was specifically in relationship to the cervical cancer that she had. And it doesn't really make sense that it would just come out of the blue, that she would have all of these sudden symptoms and then just pass away, especially since, you know, as a cancer patient, she's under fairly monitored care across her journey. This isn't something that was expected or anticipated or even brought up with her family prior to her passing. So basically it's ruled that there's no evidence that her cause of death was related to toxicity, that it affected the other staff members. So they're saying, okay, these are now two separate incidents, which, see, I'm telling you, feels like a scam.

Feels like a scam. So usually the job of the coroner's office would be done there. They would be finished, but there's lots of public pressure now for them to figure out this mystery because multiple people have been affected. Again, we moved the hospital to the parking lot for a while because of the fears. So the coroner works with the hospital, the health department, and a toxicity lab, and glorious family to do more research. And the health department depoint two medical research professionals. And they interview everyone, right? And they found that people had worked with them two feet of Ramirez and had handled her intervenous lines had been at high risk for whatever this was. But they noted that the events did not match a scenario in which fumes had been

released. The ambulance drivers experienced no symptoms. They were completely fine. And they also found that those who were affected tend to be women rather than men, which makes sense. So that's why Dr. Okoa didn't go down with the count with all the other women that were in the room. And they also had normal blood tests after the exposure. So this gives them absolutely no answer. And it ended the investigation with a conclusion of, get ready for this because it's our favorite thing for people to be diagnosed with in the hospital, which is mass hysteria. That was written as a diagnosis. yep that the investigation had a conclusion of mass hysteria so he hears oh this only affects women and all the sudden what's our diagnosis the diagnosis we give all women mass hysteria and it feels you know i don't always want to jump there but i i feel like you can't not jump there in this point

do you think that they would have had the same diagnosis if it had been all men that had been affected and not women this is just a cop out and instead of acknowledging we do not know, to make it seem like this is a psychiatric problem for all of the women who are involved is really just insulting. And so I 100% believe that they would have not given that diagnosis if there were more males who were affected by it. And who knows, We do not know why it was only women who were affected. There are things about our biology that, I don't know, perhaps having two X chromosomes made them more susceptible to whatever type of toxin or poisoning that was happening. But to just blame it on a psychiatric condition to me is just laziness and embarrassing. I'd also say, like, we don't know where these people were standing in the room.

maybe the doctor was standing in a position that was less in the line of the body, right? Like when whatever chemical or whatever came off of her body came off. And these nurses see crap all day every day. I have friends who are nurses. They, this is not the thing that's going to drive them to mass hysteria. Right. It's the guy that comes to the hospital every week and is a pain in the butt. They're the ones that might drive out.

Crazy. Yeah. This is not the person or the patient that would be. the person that eventually broke the straw that broke the camel's back, right? There's no way that you can tell me that these nurses who were hospitalized with pancreatitis and hepatitis, okay, real, real markers, all right? So, no. Yeah.

I'm calling, I'm calling bull on that. That cannot be a diagnosis. That, absolutely not. And if I was the person. who was taking care of that patient and got sick, I would not accept that either. Well, they didn't. That's a good, good thing that you wouldn't accept it, because after this conclusion, a few of the people that were affected get together, including Julie Gorginski, who had been basically the worst off in all of this, and they file a lawsuit. But by this point,

medical detectives from 10 different forensic departments investigated the case, and none of them could come to a certain conclusion. So now we're in this situation where nobody knows what did this. My only thought was how would it, if it's not coming through fumes, right? And it can't pass through the blood because it's in that airtight container. But everything else would have left a trace, right? It would have left something. I mean, if it can be disseminated through,

touch. So I'm assuming people are wearing gloves, but I don't know. You know, it just doesn't make any sense to me. There are actually some theories on what happened. So we're going to go through a couple of them. We're going to through three of them. And I want to hear your reaction. So just listen and give me your general Erin perspective on whether you think there's a good theory or a little bit of a stretch. Okay. So this is, this is the first one. So a scientific analysis, was ordered by the Riverside Coroner's Office, and they contacted Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And this investigation was headed by Patrick M. Grant, who had this theory that Gloria had been using DMSO, or dimethyl sulfoxide, which is generally used as a degreasing solution

and sold in gel form at hardware stores. Okay. So some people believe that DMSO can be used. used as a pain reliever and an anxiety reducer. Now, it has shown some promise in being an anti-inflammatory and helping people specifically with complex regional pain syndrome. But candidly, this is more of an off-label use. This is more people trying and experimenting with different ways to help manage the pain any way they can. So it is known that in the 1990s, some cancer patients used DMSO as an at-home alternative treatment. The reason this product really with the story is because it does have some side effects that she had, like the garlicky smell. When she was given oxygen by the paramedics, the oxygen might have reacted with the DMSO.

And within her system, it would have converted it into a compound called DMSO2, dimethyl sulfone. You don't really need to know all of the details on it. Basically, it just means it went from this paste or gel to crystals at room temperature, which could explain that strange matter that was found in her blood. And under the electric shocks from the defibrillator, some scientists think that DMSO2 could have been then converted again into DMSO4 dimethyl sulfate, which is a highly toxic gas. It was even used as a chemical weapon in World War I.

This gas would then explain the hospital staff's sudden fainting, nausea, muscle spasms. It's all classic symptoms of this dementia. ethylulfate exposure. So it kind of makes sense. That said, if you talk to organic chemists, they kind of dismiss the theory, citing the length of time required for reaction to happen. And the fact that this human body that they're working on is not warm enough for conversion to happen. Like you need heat to change things. And Gloria's family said she never used DMSO. So if she never used the product to begin with, this whole theory seems really stretchy. But if she had used DMSO, it would be a perfect storm of interactions to cause that.

I mean, it doesn't sound so far-fetched for her to have some sort of chemical exposure. And then the methods that were being used with the oxygen and the defibrillation could have changed the composition of those chemical compounds. And, yeah, I mean, think about, like, how does carbon monoxide poisoning happen, right? In silence, all sudden, you're down. So at the theory that there was a chemical exposure that got converted to a deadly chemical conversion, does not seem so far-fetched, but, again, it doesn't sound like the original exposure was likely. Yeah. Okay.

The next theory is pretty, pretty nefarious, okay? and it gives you a very different perspective of who's to blame, okay? So the New Times L.A. ran a story given an alternative theory, and they suggested that methamamine was the culprit. The article said that Riverside County was one of the biggest methamphetamine manufacturing and distribution points in America and suggested that some of the staff in the hospital could have been smuggling out methamene, which is commonly used as a disinfectant and cleaning agents used to sterilized surgical instruments. And they were selling it to meth cookers,

or at least according to this story. The report said that Riverside hospital workers could have used IV bags to capture and store methalamine, which are sealed and also discreet, which then could have actually ended up in the ER and got plugged into Gloria Ramirez's arm. Because methlamine turns to gas when exposed to oxygen, this would explain by no traces were found in the toxology testing that went into the air and lungs of the surrounding people.

And the symptoms of exposure to methamene are consistent with the people who came in contact with Gloria. All I'm going to say is the coroner is an elected official. I'd like to go back to that tidbit. Yeah, I guess, again, the start of the why she went into respiratory distress in the first place and failure and the oily skin and whatnot, that predates any intervention by the hospital. So, like, her decompensation is also strange. Yes. She did have cancer, though. She was stage four cervical cancer, so she could have been, I don't know. Yeah. I need a clear chain of events from how things got from A to B to C. So that's where I like 100% possible that there

could be wrongdoing, definitely. But I still don't understand the chain at this point with that theory. Okay. Theory number three. And this comes from the Ramirez family who is convinced that there was malpractice. Gloria's sister Maggie said that I've honestly believed my sister may have lived if she hadn't gone into that emergency room that night. I don't know what the county is afraid of, but we want answers. This is due to old reports about the hospital that were released. In 1991, three years before Gloria passed away, two hospital employees received medical treatment after a sterilizer leaked poisonous gas.

In 1993, sewer gas was found in the emergency room during an inspection, and independent agencies inspected the hospital and found no violations or health hazards in the events at that time. So there is a history of past, but at the same time, there are records saying this didn't happen. Or was it happening at the time Gloria went in? I mean, this is, we talked about last episode, right, the Legionnaires disease, where the disease could be coming from the hospital itself. And could there have been a faulty respirator that was leaking gas?

that was meant for sedation but was instead let out into the air possible again it seems that there is a timeline from when someone touched her to then being affected so if everyone in the room was it was exposed to the same gas leak then the doctor Ochoa would have also been affected so Yeah, unless it's only a gas that affects women. But, I mean, that seems a little bit more far-fetched, right? That I am not aware of. Okay, well, there's another fact in here that's a little bit fishy. So the family were also really suspicious because the coroner changed her initial report of dying from unnatural causes to natural causes, which we talked about the whole, like, she earlier when he was switching, how she passed away.

He said that it was mass hysteria and that her pause of death was just a renal failure. And that all the reactions were mass hysteria. Additionally, they magically lost the syringe with Gloria's odd blood, never to be found again. And what's weird is they so meticulously bagged everything else that was labeled as toxin in that room, but they lost the vial of blood. Hmm. Coroner magically loses the vial of blood. in a meth-torn city. I'm just saying.

There is a condition, and I'm liking on the technical name, but it's when the carbon atom is methylated, I think, in five ways. And it's similar to, like, the porphyria story that we had, where once you have an abnormal methylation of a compound, it can absolutely wreak havoc. So, you know, again, who knows it could be something that was administered as a medication, which was meant to serve to sedate her, but instead caused this reaction in her blood. I don't know.

I think something fishy happened. I think something, the only reason I say that is because the blood was lost. I was kind of joking in hypothesis, too. But when I found out they lost the blood, you would think that everybody and their brother would want to test that blood, right? And it's suddenly gone missing. That's real fishy. No, that is, that is very suss. It's very suss.

So Gloria is finally buried two months after her death. And county officials called the series of events surrounding her death the most baffling in local history. And honestly, the mystery remains completely unresolved to this day. nobody knows did it tell me the answer no see my stories are less fun because we get to the end and realize we don't have any clue this is literally still a medical mystery I mean is it a medical mystery for open evidence let's see oh what's open evidence is that that app that you can put anything up and it like gives you what you think it is open evidence is open evidence is a secret AI app for positions where we can ask questions.

Let's see. We have a 31-year-old female. Stage 4 cervical cancer. Came in with difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, rapid heart rate, and she was vomiting and nauseous. Then they were very specific symptoms of oily skin. Yep. low breath pressure

fruity and garlicky smelling blood that's how they described that's breath breath okay breath from the mouth and blood that smelled like ammonia okay with small manila colored particles in it

in the blood if AI solves this mystery I don't know what it'll be particles in the blood. And then three health care workers who touched the patient. Yes. Also became sick. What are the differential diagnoses? This is wild. This is the future. Here we go. Number one most likely diagnosis, dimethyl sulfoxide DMSO toxicity with possible conversion to dimethyl sulfate. which was option number one.

It was option number one. Okay. What else? What other options does it give us? The other options are just really more descriptive. So sepsis with septic shock, that's just specific. Yeah, no, that's like the stuff's happening. Yeah.

Acute renal failure with uremia. Again, that doesn't explain why the other people got sick. Diabetic starvation ketoacidosis, that's what I was talking about, the ketones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Acute hepatic failure. Arsenic poisoning. Cyanine. poisoning. And that's what I got. So AI feels like it's number one. Yeah, or something similar,

like some other cleaning agent or product that this woman was using, which is not, I'll be honest. I've seen a lot of questionable things suggested as cleaning agents just on like TikTok, right, where people are like, you should clean with this. And then you'll see like the first comment. The person's like, you absolutely should not clean this because it's not a safe thing. You should probably not put this on anything unless you have a mask on your face, right? Like, so it's not out of the question to me that that maybe she was using something. And also like, yeah, listen, I think there was a the good doctor episode or something where, or it might have even been a Gray's anatomy episode where I think it was, it was an influencer who was using Korean skin care

and there were ingredients that were in the skin care that caused something crazy like this to happen. Well, that's made me feel very comfortable doing my skin care tonight. Thanks. I think the point of all of this is that sometimes people never get a diagnosis. They never get a diagnosis.

and all it takes is for one coroner, I see you coroner, to lose a vial of blood that basically also prevents us from ever trying to figure this out in the future. Because without that blood to test, even as we learn and become more educated, there's really no way to get a clear answer. Yeah. And what unfortunately chips away at the trust is this very well could have gone down as just a medical mystery, but the fact that the evidence was improperly handled now casts this suspicion of, well, is there something more to the story? Is there something that was done

intentionally? So I think it is, it's unfortunate to say, but there are things that we will just never know. Right. Yeah. And I'll be really honest, her family may not know if she used DMSO. Right? Like, who knows? Who knows if she even knew if she was using it? Because, like, I've seen friends be like, oh, try this salve and just, like, hand you something and then you're using it because you trust your friend. So, like, she could have been doing that just out of pure, like, well, Susie at book club says this worked for her. And I think when you are in later stages of an illness, like stage four cancer, you're really looking for anything that makes things more comfortable. You're probably more open to try things than you are otherwise. When you have surgery or you have to disclose your medications, you have to disclose your supplements as well.

Because the supplements can often have significant interactions and the anesthesiologist has to be aware of those also. So always disclose your supplements in addition to your pharmaceutical medications that you're taking. Yeah. And just to piggyback on that is I had to stop taking some supplements prior to surgery. because they worried about things like blood thinning and stuff like that. And so that does not surprise me at all. Well, this was a wild ride. It's kind of fun to tell you the story, but I'm sorry that I didn't have any answer. Yeah, but I mean, our open evidence came up with one of the possibilities.

So that maybe the AI read this case and pulled this case as evidence towards it. Totally possible. Although I will say open evidence gives you links to all of the published research. So open evidence doesn't use, you know, like TikTok articles. So for example, the first link is a research paper called adverse reactions of dimethyl sulfoxide in humans a systematic review. Oh, wow. Right. So that's pretty legit.

Yeah. So it helps. I really love using it. as a physician because I know where the source is coming from. It's not just an AI summary. I can then go and do a deeper dive and say, okay, this does match what I was thinking. But sometimes, yeah, it just kind of like grabs things

from the headlines. And that's why you always have to, you can't just blindly trust AI. Yeah. Well, thanks for, I mean, you stump me. Well, I had high hope that I was going to get it anyway. But I mean, that's how I enter every episode. It's good that you felt just a little bit of what I feel every episode, which is flabbergasted by the results.

Oh, all right. Well, we will be back next week with a new guest. And we can't wait until we see you next week. And as always, if you like and appreciate the podcast, please like, comment, share with a friend. We love reading your comments. And if you have a story for the medical detectives, hopefully that has an answer. So that we can leave people satisfied. Please email us at Stories at the Medical Detectivespodcast.com.

And we really do want to hear your stories. Let us decide if it's good for the show or not. Don't keep your own glory because I feel like the best stories we have on the show are people who literally start their first conversation with us with, I didn't know if my story was going to be good enough. And then we're like, how could you not think this was good enough? It was fascinating. All right. Well, see you next week.

See you next week, guys. The Medical Detectives is a soft-skills media production, produced by Molly Biscar, sound designed by Shane Drouse. If you have a medical story, you'd like to see featured on The Medical Detectives, please email it to Stories at the Medical Detectives podcast. The information provided on the medical detectives is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. While we may feature licensed medical professionals, including doctors, we are not your personal doctors and no doctor-patient relationship is established by listening to this podcast or interacting with our content. All discussions are general in nature and may not apply to your specific health situation. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare professional before making any medical decision.

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