Mother Knows Death starring Nicole and Jemmy and Maria qk.
Hi.
Everyone walk on The Mother Knows Death. Let's get into this week's six shocking stories.
So we're starting off with a pretty strong one. When I was reading my notes last night, I was just like, this is so messed up. I don't like looking for.
I know, I was considering texting you and just saying like, hey, why don't we put this in the middle, Maybe because it's kind of a like a graphic one to start off with, but most of most of our listeners will probably enjoy it.
Yeah, all right, So police were called to this home after some neighbors were not able to get a hold of their neighbor. So when they got to the house, they walked into one of the most horrific scenes I think we've ever covered in the Grossroom and recovered on the podcast in general.
Yeah, when they walked in, they found this woman who was actively she had already what appeared to be killed her mother, but she was actively cutting the tissue off of the bones of her leg, like literally taking the skin off the bone of her leg. That's what cops walked into seeing. Yeah, So basically to visualize this. It's like this woman is laying face down on this bathroom floor, and first of all, she's missing her head as well, which is like a whole other, whole other story, but
we'll get there. So just to visualize this crime scene photo, it's this woman laying face down and basically, like all you see is there's just her hip, like all of her skin is intact from her neck to her hip, and then all of a sudden, on one of her legs there's just bone, and then there's her whole foot.
It is.
It's really disturbing.
I don't even think my description is doing it, just as how horrible this looks.
It's also very weird because there's a pan of some sort, like a big pan slash bucket thing next to her that has all of the skin thigh muscle from her leg in it next to it. I don't even know if you notice that, because you're too busy looking at the actual disturbing photo. But could you imagine I just like I can't imagine being a cop and just walking into that.
No, And like to your point, I can't give detectives enough credit, you know, because if I walked in on a scene like that, Like like that picture you're talking about, all I'm focusing on is the body, right, I'm not even looking at anything around it and what's going on around it. So I don't know. I just think it's kind of weird, like why are you saving the chunks of flesh?
I don't know, like in a separate bucket, Like why didn't she just throw them on the floor or something? But I think I don't know. I think that not that I'm a cop, but I've worked in a similar field where it's every single day you wake up and you never know what to expect. And I think those kinds of jobs are super exciting because you don't It's not like an office job that you know, Okay, I have to do these twenty tasks today of filing paperwork
or writing up things or whatever. It's like every day you walk in and it's you never know what you're gonna get. So one day you might be pulling someone over for speeding, and then the next day you walk into a room and see a woman cutting off in flash of her mom. You know, just you never know what you're gonna say.
Yeah, So, getting back to the missing head story, they found it in a pot on the countertop, so I don't know if she was planning on cooking it or something, but it was just casually sitting in a large pot with a lid on it. Yeah, that's also a disturbing picture. I can't really see it one hundred percent, but just based on looking at the margin that's exposed, which is where the woman cut her head off, it looks as if it was done after she was dead, because there's
no bleeding and the soft tissues and everything. So I guess that's a positive thing. Because we talked about a case a couple of weeks ago where where another I believe it was a daughter right caught off her mom's head. It's either a daughter or a son, but it appeared that she was still alive when it happened, so at least there's that silver lining in this story. Yeah, and the daughter had admitted to police that she was schizophrenic. She said, I'm schizophrenic. My mother attacked me and cast
a spell. So obviously nobody knows what's going on through the brain of a person dealing with that. One of the worst parts of the story is the mom had filed a police report saying that she thought her daughter would kill her, so they had that on record, which is really sad.
Yeah, and a lot of times we hear these stories that we're talking about, a person is saying that they're schizophrenic, and I think often in those cases it's these kind of weird cases of not just killing someone, it's this extra overkilling and doing weird things with body parts and
stuff like that. But in general, schizophrenia is not is not seen in you know, a lot of people that commit murders, so it's only in about ten less than ten percent of people that commit murders are either schizophrenic or bipolar or something like that. It is seen more commonly in people that do mass killings, which is interesting, right, Yeah, But believe it or not, what do you think psychological disorder is most commonly seen in people who who murder?
Well, I would I would say schizophrenia or.
Psychopath right, So, yeah, so anti social personality disorder has been linked to especially most silly serial clearers have that in common. So there is there's a difference because a personality disorder isn't the same as what you would call a brain disorder like schizophrenia or bipolar. Okay, so that's how you could tell the difference between them. But antisocial personality disorder is it's a person that doesn't show any
regards for right or wrong. They're often mean to people and evil to people and don't really feel any remorse or feel bad for how they treat people. So if you know anyone like that. But yeah, that it's schizophrenia is just we just hear about it more in these stories, but it actually isn't like people that are schizophrenic don't just go and kill people all the time.
So something else I thought was really interesting was the article that you had written in the gross room said that she had some prior medical knowledge, which is where she kind of knew amatonic anatomically where to cut the body.
Yeah, so that is interesting. I guess she worked in an emergency room and they thought that it was interesting how easily they that she cut off her head as well as cut the meat off of her bone. Literally, I mean you could say that. I know, there's always
been cases of that. There was cases where they were finding homeless people years back and saying that the way that they were killed, they were kind of dissected and it looked like medical students had done it, but I don't know in this case, like people cut off people's heads all the time that have no medical knowledge. I mean she had. She had a butcher knife, a hatchet thing like. It's just anybody could really do it if they wanted to. But this is actually an interesting side note.
So when I was teaching gross anatomy years back, I wanted to dissect one of the legs of the cadavers to show the students how to how we would do it if we got an amputation in the lab. Right, So I thought, Okay, I'm going to cut this cadaver's leg off and make it like an amputation that would
be received in the lab. So I walked over there with a scalpel blade, only thinking, okay, this is gonna I'm not exactly sure how this is going to go, because obviously I've never actually cut someone's leg off, right, yeah, And I grab it and the students are all watching me, and I took my scalpel blade and literally, with two swipes, I just cut this guy's leg right off, like it
was that easily. And it, I mean, obviously it's because I know anatomy and I knew the right spot to go, but I still didn't think it was going to be that simple, just with a tiny little blade, and I was like, wow, we were all kind of like, holy shit, that's really creepy.
Were they all looking at you?
And you were like, yes, yes, but I mean it, it was.
It was.
It's cool because the way that I like to teach gross anatomy, especially to PA students, was like, Okay, we don't really need to sit here and study all of the exact muscle attachments and all this stuff that you would if you were like a physical therapy student or even a medical student, because the majority of amputations that we get are for gangreine or even tumors or anything. But we need to look for certain things, especially the
blood vessels. And I would find that most PA students would start and not know even where they were, which is like, what's the point of taking anatomy if you don't really know what we do with it?
Yeah?
So yeah, that was fun.
Yeah, oh my god. Right, Well, at the end of it and everything, she was admitted to a mental health facility, so hopefully she was getting the treatment and she's in a safer environment for herself as well.
At the end of that I wonder in cases like this, if you have diagnosed schizophrenia and you're not on medications or it's not controlled, what happens once you get medicated and you're thinking more normally and clearly. Is this something that you feel terrible remorse for or you know, because once it hits reality and you're thinking more like a normal person would think, I'm curious how you would feel about that.
I mean, one would only hope that it works in a way where you're essentially blacked out during the action, So maybe you don't have direct memories of that, but
you're aware it happened obviously. Yeah, But that's all I could hope for, is that because of the disorder, that something in your brain blocks it out, that when you're like when the fog is clear, that you don't remember specifics about what happens, you're not reliving that trauma daily, because I feel like that would contribute to getting worse.
Yeah, I can't even imagine. No.
Our next story, so that one's called meat off the Bone for anybody looking for the pictures in the gross room. So our next story was submitted by a listener, And this one's a little bit of a long one, but it's certainly one of the craziest ones. So our listener had got married in December of twenty twenty and when her new husband moved in, he brought two female dogs along with him. Personally, for me, that would be a deal breaker.
Right, I mean, she she knew that that was coming. I guess.
So.
Yeah.
So after a couple months, the dogs get into a fight and each of them grabbed one of the dogs. Her husband had grabbed a larger dog, and she grabbed the smaller dog. So even though they had a hold of both of the dogs, they just kept fighting and snapping at each other, and eventually the bigger dog ended
up biting our listener on her hand. So she said that even though she only had a couple of visible dog bites and a small drop of blood, she completely lost function in her hand, to which everybody thought she was being dramatic about.
Yeah, and you know that that happens. I guess. There was a room full of people and they were like, relax, you have a dot on your hand and a drop of blood, so and it's not that big of a deal.
Yeah, And this happened at nighttime, and she thought about going to the emergency room or urgent care. But everybody knows the hassle of going to the er and then your whole family's telling you you're fine. So she was like, all right, I'll just kind of I'll just go to bed and see what plays out in the morning. So she said, in the middle of the night, she woke up and it was such excruciating pain. So right when
urgent care opened in the morning, she went there. At urgent Care, they gave her an X ray and they didn't see anything. They put her on some antibiotics, and she kind of just went on her way.
Yeah, so I don't know urgent care. I had a similar thing happened to me when I partially amputated my finger when I was being lazy and using a knife to cut a zip tie instead of going in the house and getting a pair of scissors. But when I went to urgent care, I told you, like, I almost fainted from the pain of it. And it wasn't it wasn't really a bad incision, right, didn't look terrible. I mean, you could see some of my subcutaneous tissue coming out,
but it wasn't anything crazy. But it hurts so bad. And when I went, They same thing, they X rayed your bone's fine, it's not, but it's still hurt so bad. For days weeks. I finally went to a hand surgeon and he's like, yeah, you severed your nerve in half, and like, what are we going to do about it now?
You know?
So I think that there's a certain level of like urgent care just looks like, hey, your bone's not broken, there's nothing we could do for you here, kind of move on. So and also we have to keep in
mind the dates that we're talking about right now. This was a February twenty twenty one, so we were only about a year into the pandemic, and anyone that's had medical care in the past four years, especially during that time, knows that the only thing that mattered was COVID, right like anything else, Just like doctors just became completely fixated. Some doctors came completely fixated on COVID and just like couldn't think of anything else for whatever reason.
Yeah, and so over the next couple of weeks, she was going in and out of several different hospitals. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. She was consulting with hands, they were giving her all these different antibiotics and pain killers and all this stuff, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. And this
whole time you know her. It goes from her hand swelling to going halfway up her arm to the point where they were drawing a line on her arm to see if it was going past where it was swollen before. Did you ever have to do this with a spider bite?
No, no, I never did. But when Pop Pop had MRSA, we did that with him and it was crazy how much it grew up his arm. The thing is is that they did recognize that she had an infection. They just they kept giving her MRIs and imaging and stuff, and they said that she had a weird infection in her tendon, but they couldn't figure out what the bacteria
was that was causing it. So they were pumping her full of antibiotics, and at one point she was on nine different antibiotics and it still wasn't going away.
And because so they were also admitting her overnight in some of these cases, and sometimes for several days, and because it was COVID, she wasn't allowed to have any visitors. So she's like in the hospital all by herself dealing with this, and it's super scary because.
Getting tested for COVID every single time she goes by the way, because that was the only thing that mattered.
Yeah, So I don't know, it was just so so all over the place.
Yeah. So, like I said, they were testing or for COVID testing or for everything else, but what were they not testing her for pregnancy? Yeah? So anytime a woman, especially of child bearing age, is going to the hospital and is either getting exposed to radiation between X rays
and MRI or CT scans or anything like that. And another thing is is if they're getting drugs like hardcore drugs, antibiotics that are not advised to be used in pregnancy, and painkillers that are not advised to be used in pregnancy, the first thing that they should do when you get to the hospital is do a pregnancy test to make sure that all of those tests are and medications are safe for you to use. Yeah.
And she even said at one point in one of her many hospital visits that somebody had asked her if she was pregnant, and she said it was a possibility she had just gotten married, right, But at no point did anybody actually test her for it.
Yeah, So it turns out after all of this, I mean it was it was months later after the initial injury, it turns out she was pregnant the entire time.
Yeah, and then just after a couple of weeks, it just it just kind of went away and she was able to use her hand again as normal.
Like I don't, yeah, completely crazy and luckily like her daughter was born and is healthy and she doesn't have any issues. But there's reasons why they tell you that you can't have radiation or you really need to limit it when you're pregnant, because it can affect the fetus. The fetus could be born with malforma that it increases their risk of cancer when they grow up. It could
cause miscarriagters, all these different things. And they do do radiation tests on people sometimes in the hospital when they're pregnant because it's one of those you know, the risks or the benefits outweigh the risk kind of thing. I mean, people break bones all the time and stuff, but it's like you really want to limit it as much as possible or do other tests that don't have as much radiation. But the drugs are also a thing too. Yeah, in pregnancies.
There's classes of drugs, so they have ABCD and x X as drugs you shouldn't take during pregnancy because they're known to cause problems with defeatus, miscarriage and things like that. And some of these medications that she was on were in classes of drugs that they would not give pregnant people. So she's very lucky that everything worked out well for her.
So at the end of it, what do you think happened? It just went away by itself.
Well, it's a similar thing that we talk about, for example, with Lucea she had. I was writing about this yesterday because we were talking about Glenn Frye from the Banned Eagles in our Celebrity Death dissection this week, and he had rheumatat arthritis and may have possibly died as a result of the medications he was on. And my daughter
was on similar medications for an autoimmune bone disorder. She ended up getting psoriasis, and then because she was considered immuno suppressed from those medications, she picked up a weird fungal infection in one of her psoriasis plaques. Because her immune system wasn't strong enough to fight off that. But she developed that wound and it was an active, nasty, angry wound for about almost a year, with multiple trips, biopsies, this, that,
and the other. She was on so many different antibiotics, anti fungal creams, medications, oral medications, and nothing was really taking care of it. But then one day it just started going away. So sometimes, especially with like fungal infections, they take away longer time to respond to the medications and heal. So I don't know if they actively saw she had an infection, why they didn't go in and do surgery and try to culture it to see what
the actual organism was. I mean, that would make the most sense unless they didn't feel they could safely do that for whatever reason. I don't know anything because I wasn't there, but it just it makes the most sense that it was happening during COVID time, because I think that people just like weren't thinking straight.
Yeah for sure. Okay, this next story. In the early two thousands, Taiwan was facing an epidemic of SARS. So first you want to explain what that is for everyone.
Sars is is It's like COVID. It's the same kind thing. I remember when I was working at the hospital around the time when I first graduated school, there was a big outbreak of it. And since the hospital I worked out was close to Chinatown, it was like there was a lot of people in Chinatown that were wearing masks all the time. And you know, now, of course that's kind of normal to see, but back then it was
just like, why are all these people wearing masks? Yeah, oh there's you know, something crazy is going on over there and whatever. But so it was, but it was the same level of panic, especially over there. It didn't really become a thing over here, but it was the same level of panic. So think about all of the crazy shit stories you heard of people doing during the
COVID pandemic. It was the same thing with sars. Okay, So, in this case, this forty five year old woman had come to the belief that alcohol could prevent SARS, so she went to the most extreme level, which was filling a whole bathtub with alcohol and then summer herself inside
of it. Yeah, so she took this bath of alcohol at eleven o'clock at night, and the following morning slash afternoon, at eleven o'clock, her family had found her dead in the bathtub, she was not submerged underwater, and at autopsy there was no signs that she drowned. There was barely even any fluid in her stomach, and the way that the bathtub was set up, it just wasn't really possible for her to be one hundred percent underwater. Her head
was above water. And interesting, they tested the water and found that it had forty percent ethanol in it, and so when they did the toxicology on her, they found that her blood alcohol level was one point three five percent, And just to give you a little bit of a comparison, zero point four zero percent is considered a fatal blood alcohol level. So she was over or three times that Jesus right, and which just wouldn't even be possible for her to drink that much, but she didn't because there
wasn't even any fluid in her stomach. And they believed that the method that you know, that killed her was that it absorbed through her skin.
Yeah, which this article is also saying that that type of like absorption like death from that is very rare, or intoxication in general through skin absorption is rare. I guess remember a couple of years ago, people were like soaking tampons in alcohol, Yeah, putting them up there and then either I don't know if anybody.
Getting drunk that way.
Yeah, I don't know if anybody died from it. I know people were getting sick from it, but.
Yeah, people don't often think about you know, if you say what's the largest organ in the body and then you say, oh, it's skin, people are like get they get taken back. They don't think about their skin as being an organ. Yeah, and it is, and it could absorb medications. There's off medications that are prescribed in like the birth control patch, fed in all patches, things like
that that could just absorb right through the skin. So I mean rubbing alcohol in your skin to get your blood taken or something like that obviously isn't going to cause this, But like immersing your whole entire body in ethanol surely killed this woman.
Oh yeah, I mean this is an episoce. I can't even imagine how horrible that was to die. And they were saying, at some point she was probably so intoxicated that she wouldn't have even been able to get out of the tub by herself. So even if she realized what was happening like it's too late.
Yeah, And I don't know if that was I mean, there's not much information if that was a rumor that was going around, if this is the only person that happened to, whatever. But I mean, it sucks being so fearful of something and then dying from something else, right, yeah, because you were trying to prevent that from happening.
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And next week I'm not sure if we even have situated, Wait, you have situated who we're gonna do?
Right, Yeah, We're gonna write about the case from the HBO show There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, So I'm gonna start writing that up this week. It's a case that has been heavily requested by you guys, so I'm
excited to dive into that one. If anybody is watching Chimp Crazy on HBO right now, I just wrote up a couple of the incidents they talked about in the show because a couple of years ago you had done a high profile case on Carla Nash and I wanted to so they had mentioned that case and I wanted to talk about another horrific chimpanzee attack. So that went up this morning, so you guys can check that out. Yeah, and we have a couple crazy videos going up this week.
So and obviously these posts that we talk about in the Grocerroom with six shocking stories, were actually going to put the titles of the articles in our newsletter so you could easily find them. So make sure you get signed up for that and sign up for the Grocery Room. So visit the Grossroom dot com for more info and to sign up from A five ninety nine for the month. This next story is in the grocerroom and it's called
a colorful palette. So a twenty seven year old woman went to the hospital with a sudden onset of nause vomiting in abdominal pain. Her abdomen was descended and a little bit tender. So when they did a CT scan, it showed that she had multiple quote lesions with in her stomach. So then they went and did an endoscopy and what did they find.
They found a whole entire box worth of crayons that is in her stomach. Yeah, it is nuts.
Oh my god.
You know what's you know what's crazy. So I have to forcibly say crayons because when I was working at the hospital with Andrea, right, she one day we were talking about these colorful things that you color with and I was like, oh, yeah, like a box of crowns. Yeah, I say, Cryzone, this is crowns, right, And she was like, you know, she's from northern New York, like near Buffalo
and stuff. So I said, she's like, what did you say, And I said crowns, like crowns and she's like, no, that's a crown is the like what you wear on the top of your head. And I was like I know that's a crown and she's like and then she's like, but what are the coloring things? And I'm like, crowns and she I was like, there's a difference, and she we were cracking up laughing about it. And so when I was just doing like the voice dictating, when I was doing my notes, I said crowns and it wrote
crowns crowns. So that's just like, I don't know if that's just like a qualitiery family speech impediment, where if it's like a Philly thing and other people in Philly say crowns too.
No, I don't think. Well, I'm sure this isn't the case for everybody, but I think most people in the Philadelphia area cannot say the word crayon like that sounds.
So it's it is so I have to be like crayon.
And crayolas are made near us, So why would they make this difficult word if our natural accents can't say?
I know? And another one that I have a hard time with is taol, Like I will say tel for like the thing that you dry your body off with is a towel. Towel.
That's how Dee Dee said it.
Remember she used to say towel, yeah, and we used to make fun of her, and she was actually right, and she said how she uses howel like I say tal, But if you say twel like in a voice dictation, it would probably spell T A L E or T A I L like. I don't know.
I used to say pattern too. I'm sure. People, I'm curious, please comment how you pronounce it, because I just have always said crown. I feel like most people I know say crown.
Well that's because everybody talk who lives around here.
Yeah, exactly so, but.
When you talk to some way from another another part of the world or even the country, they're just like, yeah, you're you're mispronouncing that.
We're talking about the waxy coloring tool that children most often use, if anybody's right.
So people that eat a waxy coloring tool that has no nutritional value. That's called pika, and it is seen sometimes with mental disorders like schizo effective personality disorder. So we were talking earlier about schizophrenia, and this is kind of a mixture of schizophrenia and kind of bipolar stuff too, so you'll have the hallucinations and everything that you would
have with schizophrenia. But then you also have some things that you would see with bipolar, like manic episodes and just the strong feeling of self hyper sexual and things like that. So it's like a combination of that. And so this pika that this person had, for whatever reason, thought it was a good idea to eat all of these and one pen was found in there too.
Yeah, and some rappers. So what what was interesting to me is a couple of weeks ago when we talked about pica, we had that woman who is eating all that's silverware, right, but she would like nobody was really monitoring her. This woman was living in a psychiatric facility, So how did she get eighty one crowns in her stomach like with nobody realizing she was eating them?
Well, I mean they don't watch did you ever see girl interrupted?
Yeah?
Like, I mean not that that's like one hundred percent of full picture of what happens, and that also took place years ago. But I assume that they're they're living, they're not in a jail cell, they're not and and they're kind of like in a living area that's common space. And typically a person wouldn't think that crayons could hurt a person, right, and they just were out so people could color in things like I don't it's not it's
not like it's a knife. I mean, otherwise you just won'n't be able to give a person anything, because anything you could have flowers on the desk and somebody could eat them or a poison themselves. I don't you know what I mean, Like, there's just like no limit as to what somebody could hurt themselves with.
It's also like the thought of swallowing that whole. I can't even swallow my vitamins every morning. I just don't undertand how people do it.
It's I think it's kind of cool in a way, Like it's you know, maybe they had skills to be a sword swallower in their life and they're just not using their skills to their capabilities.
Maybe all right, So this next story in the grocerroom is called brain quote parasite. So a pregnant woman had gone in for a prenatal checkup and was told that the head circumference of her fetus was enlarge, but doctors didn't really know what could be causing it. So the baby was delivered at thirty seven weeks by C section, and they did confirm after the delivery that the baby's
head was larger than normal. So over the next year, the babies had continued to increase in size to the point where the baby could not sit up by herself or stand up.
Yeah, And I'm not sure where this happened and how this would be handled if it happened in America. I just think it's a little weird if a baby I think in most cases, if a baby is born and has that's why they do all these weights measurements and stuff, because children should all be on a certain curve of how big their head's growing, how big their bones are growing, and stuff. And there's all these different measurements at weeks gestation and then days of age, months of age and
things like that. And you know, kids are always some are lower, some are higher. But when they're way off the charts, that's when you start working up someone and doing a lot of tests. And I don't know when they realized that the baby's head was big when it was born. Why it took a year for the child's head to just continue to grow and there was no intervention or testing done to see what was causing it.
But when they finally did bring the baby in because, like Maria said, the kid's head was so big, and you could see the picture of it in the post in the gross room, you could see why the child was having a hard time keeping her head up. They did imaging and they found striking things. So of course they found fluid in her brain, which is called hydrocephalus, which is normally to be expected. But the craziest thing is is that they saw things that looked like it
could have been pieces of a fetus. There were bones visible that almost looked like a fetus on imaging, and it was just very weird.
Yeah, So then they went in and did surgery and removed this mass that they weren't really sure what it was at first, and it.
Ended up being fetus in feetw Yeah, So fetus in fee two is it's almost it's almost like think about a parasite and how it lives off of you. So what happens is is that the fetus is living off of the healthy child, So it's kind of the formed, it's not well formed, and its entire life depends on living off of the other child. It's a form of congenital twin. Actually there's two different theories as to what
this is. They think that possibly during development that just the fetus somehow gets enveloped like enveloped inside of the other baby. And it's very very rare. It only happens one in every five hundred thousand berths, so it's super rare, but it happens. And there's another theory because there's this kind of tumor that you could get usually in female ovaries that's called the terratoma. That's made up of germ cells, which are the cells that create or help create humans.
So these tumors can have hair and teeth. And we've talked about this before. And the difference is, they say between a tratoma and a fetus in FE two, is that fetus in FEE two has a vertebral column or spine. And in this case, when you see this, when you see this fetus, this it's kind of a malformed fetus. You could see that it has a lot of parts including eyes, a mouth, it has a spinal column, it
has hands, feet, it's it's insane looking. So to think that that was developing inside of this child's brain and it took a year for them to figure it out, was crazy.
No, it is really crazy. And then just you know, unfortunately, because of the nature of this surgery and this rare thing going on, the other child did not survive either because of it. Yeah, so when they took the when they took the fetus out of her brain, she just kept having seizures and stuff and died within twelve days of surgery.
Which this is the thing, like even if they did surgery right after she was born, I mean, and maybe they don't really describe like why they waited. I don't know. I mean, obviously, doing brain surgery on a baby is not anything that you want to do. And I just don't even know if they identified it prior to that. But it's possible that no matter what, this kid was going to end up dying from it just because of
the location. It's not like it was in or abdomen and they could safely cut it out and that's the end.
Of the story, you know, because it's not always in the brain, right, it could really be anywhere.
In that body. And you hear of crazy cases of like old people that just kind of lived healthy lives and never really had anything wrong with them and getting imaging dumb when they're sixty years old and having like this hard, weird mass inside of their stomach and they open it up and it's like this like mummified fetus inside of their body that's been there since they were born, which is insane. But you hear of cases like that, Well, this is called like a stone baby sometimes.
Well this is a good transition into our last story. People that are living their whole lives not knowing something wrong with them. So in France, a forty four year old male had gone to the hospital because he started feeling weakness in one of his legs. And what did they discover?
So they did imaging on him and because he was on he was forty four, and like anytime somebody's showing signs of that, they want to check to make sure they don't have more likely a brain tumor. That's what they're looking for. And they look at the scan and they noticed that he has no brain essentially, like he has ninety percent of his brain is gone and it's just an empty space filled with fluid.
Do you think when they first did the scans they were like, something must be wrong with the machine, because I don't seem so unfathomable that like, how would you even respond to this, you know.
What's you know what's interesting about radiology? I think most of the time for me anyway, radiology is kind of boring. But in cases, there are certain cases though that it's like so fascinating to see as especially because these doctors are usually the first ones to see like real pathology because they're doing the testing for it. And this one is so striking because when you look at it, normally you wouldn't see a large black space in someone's skull.
So it just I can't imagine being the radiologist reading that because you would just be like, no, am I looking at that? Because I guarantee that mostly none of them, if not all of them, had never seen anything like that in their life. Yeah, and you and you didn't learn about it even in school. So it's just like, what exactly is how like I'd love to read the report on that actually. Yeah.
And so basically he was living a totally normal life. He had a family and everything, and then when he went to the hospital they tested his IQ, which he tested it in eighty four, which is just below the normal range. I think normal range the lowest one is eighty five, so he was just below it. And he had no idea he was missing ninety percent of his brain.
Doesn't that make you wonder, like if other people are living with something like this, you know, yeah, Now it's it's just it's just so it's so outrageous to be and so they when they did some further investigation, they found out that when he was born, he had a condition known as hydrocephalus, which is what we were just talking about, having fluid around the brain. And there's lots
of people born with that. It's just there could be different reasons that it happens, but fluid accumulates around the brain. And what they did was they put in a shunt in his brain, which is kind of like a like a straw thing that just takes the fluid out and gets it out of the brain. And when he was fourteen, they took it out and that was kind of the
end of the story. And when they just thought, like, this is what they think, is that just like that hydrocephalus was like compressing his brain over time, and it's just like he just adapted to living like that. It's just it kind of is blown everybody's mind, to be honest.
So it just like eroded over all that time.
Yeah, like the fluid just was keeping it like pushed down to the side. And it's cool because now they think, you know, everyone has all these theories on how the brain works and everything, and people would think like, well, if you damage one part of the brain, then then that's damaged forever. But they're thinking like, well, maybe that's not the case, Like maybe other parts of the brain
take over. You hear about that, right, Like you lose your sense of smell, but then your your eyesight gets better or something like that, one of your other senses kind of picks up for the lack of the other one in a way like, yeah, they're thinking that that could possibly be a thing now, And it reminds me of a case I don't did we talk about that on this podcast, the one that's called I See what you are thinking?
I think?
So, yeah, well I'll just talk about it really quick again that there was this guy that went to the emergency room and he was just like, oh, I have a headache, and they did an examine on him and here he had had surgery when he was younger that put a bur hole in his skull, which is he probably fell and hit his head or something and had a little bit of a bleed and they had to evacuate the blood out of this hole. And over twenty years,
he was packing this hole with wet paper towels. I don't know why he was doing that or who told him to do that, but he had like eroded a huge hole in his scalp and his skull and when you look down into the top of his skull, it looked like like a cereal bowl, like it's completely empty, and you just look and you're like, this guy, same thing. He has like literally ninety percent of a brain that
he's functioning with. And this guy had some weakness in some of his limbs, but he was in a wheelchair, but he was still able to walk a little bit by himself talk everything like that, like it's it's nuts.
Yeah, it is absolutely crazy. And I mean they were saying that, like scientists have always had this belief you only need that you only use ten percent of your brain, and like does this actually scientifically confirm that or what?
But yeah, that's really interesting.
All right, guys. Well, if you have a shocking story, please submit it to stories at Mothernosdeath dot com. Don't forget that email is always in the description of every episode. And don't forget our Giant Microbes contest is still going on. So if you head over to Apple and leave us a written review, take a screenshot of that, and email it. Also to stories that Mother Knows Death, you will enter for a chance to win one of three giant microbes.
Yes, it was a uterus, a brain, and chlamydia.
Yeah, and they're super cute. You can also you know, say if you want one in particular. We can't guarantee it, but we like reading the stories we've been getting so far about which one.
Oh, they're pretty good, so I can't wait to share it with you guys.
Actually, thank you guys. We will see you later in the week with the news.
Thanks Toya, thank you for listening to Mother Nos Death. As a reminder, my training is as a pathologist's assistant. I have a master's level education and specialize in anatomy and pathology education. I am not a doctor, and I have not diagnosed or treated anyone dead or alive without
the assistance of a licensed medical doctor. This show, my website, and social media accounts are designed to educate and inform people based on my experience working in pathology so they can make healthier decisions regarding their life and well being. Always remember that science is changing every day, and the opinions expressed in this episode are based on my knowledge
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