How Blood Pattern Analysis Works

Day cards Hallmark. No, it was even earlier than that. A little guy by the name of St. Valentine. Okay, again this is uncorroborated, but I'm pretty sure it's true. Back in the day, St. Valentine used to hang out with the Pagan I believe Greeks maybe uh Romans, one of the two and um who had a custom of hooking up like picking a partner and you know that was who you're gonna be with for the rest of the year. Not married, all right, but like all the benefits,

you know what I mean? And um. They to consummate that choice. They would you know, go off and hook up like that day February same Valentine comes along and goes, this is an importance to my god and um, soon to be your god. So let's let's figure something else out. How about you guys, keep picking people that you want to, you know, be friendly with, stop the fornication, and instead just send notes of affection to one another. Those became as far as I know, the Valentine's Day card. I'm

sure that sounds sounds good to me, does it all right? Um? One of the one of the great symbols of Valentine's Day, Chuck, is the heart, which is almost invariably colored red. It's a very cute iconography, but if you really think about it, what you're seeing is the organ colored by our life blood. What happens when something happens to that organ or that life blood and it goes from inside that cute little heart to being sprayed all over the wall at a

high speed velocity, A bunch of things happen. A lot of tell tale symbols are left behind after the person falls forward, killed by the love of their life. On Valentine's Day, no less but but bud spatter, Bud spatter. Yeah, we should say probably right now, it's not splatter. Blood spatter, which, strangely enough, is is a an appropriate interchangeable term or phrase for blood pattern analysis can also be called blood spatter analysis. To you see that, Yes, it's interchangeable, or

it can be called that stuffed dexter? Does it? Could you like Dexter? Don't you? Yeah? So do you? Okay? So I know that I have a lot of bad karma coming against me. Um, because let me explain why it wasn't just a blanket statement. Um, because of the three times now that I've ruined um six ft under for people who haven't seen the whole thing. But I

have not seen season five. So if you're gonna talk about Dexter, don't give me any clues as to what goes on season five aside from the um off camera breakup of the marriage between Michael Hall and Jennifer Carpenter. That was very sad, but Julia Styles has nothing to do with it. She even released a statement she said, really she felt like she needed to Yeah, interesting, which is not her style usually. No, she's pretty lucky. So chuck, um, do you want to talk about dex Uh? Yeah, Well,

I mean, he's a Nina. What I couldn't find out is he's on the show. He is a crime scene photographer slash spatter analyst, and I couldn't find if that's really a thing. So, Mike, Mike, I'm guessing. I'm positing that maybe in some smaller municipalities they may do double duty like that, But I bet in Miami they probably

have a dedicated photographer, dedicated analysts. Uh yeah, Actually, UM, from this article, I believe it says that a lot of people, um, a lot of people who become blood pattern analysts UM, start out as cops or detectives or whatever and kind of um find that they have a pension for reading blood and they start taking courses and workshops and become certified. So I imagine, yeah, it's possible, especially in smaller areas, that people are pulling double or

triple duty like that. Yeah, you're probably not gonna in some like tiny county, you're not gonna have a full time crime scene photographer, or maybe it's some local that's not on the But you know, we'll get to all that because this is a two parter. Well one reason chuck that um it's not um just an across the board filled position or even um available position at every every UM police department is because, as it's put in the article, it's as much art as science right now.

It takes a lot of um interpretation and you can't just you know, hand the stuff over to the prosecutor and they're just like bam, case closed. There's a blood pattern analysis. Yeah, look all the blood on the wall. He did it. But it is used to corroborate other evidence because as we said, it does tell a story when um, the person who you love shoot you through the heart and spattered your blood all over the wall on Valentine's Day, killing you dead. Yeah. Yes, you can

tell a lot of things, UM. For instance, this list that I'm about to the type and velocity of the weapon you always hear about. You know this is a blunt force thing or knife, stab, wound, gunshot. The number of blows that this person uh could withstand before dying and even after death. Yeah, I mean think about a passion killing, rage killing. Uh, the handedness of the assailant because everyone knows, you know, if I was going to punch you in the face, to do with my right

hand hit you on your left cheek, that's how it works. Uh, position of the victim, and like whether or not they were moved or they flailed around on the floor for a little while trying to trying to live, pull themselves to safety. Perhaps um, the wound that was inflicted first, like this was to kill wound, and all this other stuff happened because it was just a sicko type of injury.

How long ago the body has been there, and whether it was an immediate death or whether they bled out over the course of hours or whether they Yeah, if it was an immediate death in the blood just kind of pulled where they fell, or if they're smears from them crawling or something like that, which would indicate that death was delayed or being dragged. Maybe there's nobody. Yeah, I think that I took from this. It wasn't explicitly said,

but there's UM. You can, especially with an old crime scene, UM, learn a lot about something where there's no other evidence just from the blood, like UM, skeletonized blood. Yeah, blood can actually where there was once a blood droplet, it can skeletonize and flick away and there will be no drop, but there will be an outline ring around where the drop was. Right. Um. You can also uh tell from

the amount of clotting that's taken place. Apparently, once clotting starts, you know that, um, it's been at least fifteen minutes, which probably isn't that helpful, but it's been at least fifteen minutes since the blood exited the body. So like we didn't come up on the person died more than fifteen minutes ago, we can say that, um. And then but if some stuffs more clotted than others, you can tell that, um, the attack took place over a period

of time. Sure, and we talked about in crimes can clean up obviously, how it can harden, brain can harden on walls. So it's not just blood. They're looking at all sorts of bone fragments and pieces of whatever that's in you that is no longer in you. But as we'll see, just the presence of of say brain and skull fragments UM indicates a head wound. It does you're all on your way to being certified. UM. And it also usually indicates you know, probably what type of weapons

we'll see later. Right. Uh. The cool thing about blood, though, Josh, is that it's very predictable. It's very cohesive, has a lot of surface tensions, so the molecules like buying really tight, so it's always a little round sphere until it hits something. And when it hits something, it's really predictable what happens, like you can read it and pretty much be able to tell things that will get into like angle and velocity and stuff like that with some certainty, so much

that they use in court. Yes, they do to put people in the pokey sometimes unfairly. We will see that too. Should we talk about the types of spatter? This is my favorite part. The three types of spatter hit it? Then okay, well there's low velocity, medium velocity, and high velocity, right, and that sounds pretty stupid, but there's um the different characteristics of each type of velocity group. Right. Um. So you know when when blood moves, like you said, it

follows like predictable patterns. Um. Gravity, force, surface tension keeps it together. Um. And for example, say how high up a blood drop drips from is going to determine how spread out that drop is, sure, because it has more time to accelerate and a greater force when it hits the ground. Then if it's you know, an inch or

two off of the ground. So that's a pretty good example of a low spatter velocity of blood drip, right, Yeah, Like I've been stabbed and I'm laying on my couch with my arm dangling off and it's just dripping off my fingertip twelve inches to the carpet below. That's great. The the force that's acting on this low velocity blood spatter is gravity, nothing else, right. Um. They usually come

from stab wounds, like you said. Uh. And then some of the properties of a of a low velocity blood spatter, Um, the force of impact is less than five ft per second, not much. That's not much. Um, that's like a blood drop, right, Yeah, between usually between four and eight millimeters. That's about the size you're gonna get with a low veloci And like you said, um, it's it's you've been stabbed and you're

laying there. So most of the low velocity blood spatters, uh come about after an attack, after the injury has been sustained. Right, It's not sprayed all over the wall. Right. So stabbing is a pretty good Usually it's stabbing is low velocity or vice versa. Um, and uh. One type of low velocity blood spatter from stabbing is called a passive spatter. That's after you've been stabbed and you're walking

around and you're basically leaving a dripping blood trail. Ye, should we at this point say that this might be a little gruesome? It's too late. I think it's a little late. A right, I guess we could go to the trouble went back and inserting it. But I predict, hold on, I predict we will not. We will not. So let's just say that now you can turn it off at this point if you have already, if you're a little creeped out by blood, which I am, Are

you really? Yeah? I mean not you picked these? Yeah, But I mean it doesn't mean we shouldn't cover it. I'm not like, I don't have a true phobia, but I mean, who likes seeing large amounts of blood and that bright, bright red white surfaces? It's have you ever passed out at the side of blood? No? No No, it's

not that bad. I had a roommate in college named John Johnson real name, who was shucking oysters down in Florida when we were down at the beach once and uh, he shucked the meat of the palm of his hand and looked at it, and none of us knew that he was afraid of his own blood and just fell right over. And he was a big boy, so he made quite a clamor he he came to and you know, it was okay after that, but he fainted dead away

at the sight of his own blood. Well, I'm I I mean, I've never seen something really, really, really gruesome. So have you never seen pictures? Yeah? I don't like that stuff. I don't either, but um, yeah, I'm not into it, but people are and we'll get to that too. Medium velocity is next, and that has a force from five to one ft per second, diameter no more than formula millimeters usually, and that can be caused by a blunt object or I love this line, like a baseball

bat or an intense beating with a fist. You've gotta be a tough guy, dude. If you're If you can have the same impact as a baseball bat with your fist, then you're either doing something right or wrong, or you are you're using breath knuckles. Yeah, that's true. So that could also be from a stabbing. Actually, um, and in this case, if you damage an artery, something can happen called projected blood, and that means you're laying there and as long as your heart's beating, it's really pumping that

blood out and it can project in a very distinctive pattern. Evidently. Yeah. I mean like if you if you ever see somebody who's um carotid artery has been punctured and they have their hand there, it's just like spewing from between their fingers. It's projected blood. That's medium velocity, which can be compared to a like, um, a good squirt gun. What are those ones called supersuckers, like that kind of spray, um,

And it's not just the heart that's projecting it. And that's a that's a good example of media velocity, the heart pumping the blood and projecting it out of the body. Right. Um. Another medium velocity blood spatter is let's say, um, you're beating somebody with a lead pipe when you're drawing back again to exactly that's what I thought of too. I thought about that, Um, when you're drawing back for another blow, you're you're whipping the blood off of the lead pipe

after that first blow. So that's medium medium velocity, which you said is about uh five percent. Yeah, okay, So then you have high velocity, which is pretty much a gunshot wound, and that's more than a hundred feet per second. That's when blood is really hauling. You've got tiny little sprays on the wall or wherever, and that's the one where you're gonna find like tissue and bone usually along

with the blood. Chances are um less than one millimeter in diameter, and you can either have you can have front spatters, back spatters or both. If the bullet goes through you, you're gonna have both. Yeah, and then exit one. Yeah. I think about it like anytime you see somebody get shot, like the blood almost doesn't spatter, like you'll just start

soaking the shirt or something like that and don't look behind. Yeah, you look behind and all of a sudden, there's a huge hole because of cavitatione full metal jacket comes to mind. Mm hmm. So you have seen grewsome things in the movie. What is your major mouth function? Uh? And my favorite thing in this on this page was the bit about internal muzzle staining and stippling. Sick stuff, but pretty awesome too. Yeah if basically and well, I guess it could happen

in any kind of gunshot that's close. But I think of an execution style murder, like when the mobster says, we need to whack Jimmy two ft. I guess two ft would be normal. But yeah, he's got he's the most nondescript gangster of all time exactly which one again? Um, So they would put the gun like up to his head, and in that case, the skin, if there's still a body, can have burns from the gunpowder, and the inside of the muzzle, because of the cooling of the explosive gas used,

can actually suck blood back inside of the gun. Yeah, the spray that fine myth. So if you're lucky enough to get ahold of that gun, they can swab the inside and like this is Jimmy two feets blood on the inside of your muzzle here, buddy, that's how you just throw it in the East river. Yeah, or use the old pillow method. Don't don't be cheap, right, Wow, I just gave advice to murderers. Yeah, that's weird. I guess we did. I've never done that before. Uh. The

other thing, I'm sure you have it. The other thing that they can look for is, uh, you got to use brass knuckles is a void and avoid is where let's say I were to kill somebody and the blood is spraying on me and the wall behind me. That will be uh, you're gonna leave a handsome silhouette. Yeah, not an outline of a body like a cartoon. But there will be avoid there where they said, you know, something or somebody got in the way of the blood spatter.

Don't find me that shirt, which is now in a trash. Can find me that last chance garage hat covered in blood, that'd be bad news. I love that hat, So Chuck, you've seen Dexter. We talked about this, right, see them all? Yeah, I have to except for season five, right, oh Dexter. I thought you meant like all crime. Oh no, no, I've seen each episode. Sorry, Um, well, surely you've seen then at least I know for a fact. And at least one episode he's messing with like these red strings

in the room. That's when the art department really gets involved. Yeah, so this you can you can imagine. Check this is a very painstaking process, each each of these lines, not just for the art department, but this happens in real life. It's it's a method of figuring out the angle of um, the path of blood. Yeah, I thought this might be outdated, but they still use it sometimes they do. Um. Well, let's there was something that the article I thought left out,

and it was the importance of determining the angle. It just went into how we figure out angles. Um. But there's a lot of import in figuring out what angle these this blood spray travel traveled, right, Yeah, because it will tell you a lot of times. You know that the person who fired the weapon was probably taller than six ft because the gun was at a certain level, and so was it a man? Was it likely a man?

Was it likely a woman based on the height? Right? Um, the if if it's a downward angle, then that might corroborate the idea that this person was killed execution style, which juries like to hear about if that's going on, because that's like get on your knees type of thing. Usually, Yeah, that's pretty cold blooded. Um. If somebody's pleading self defense and said they were on the floor, an upward angle would would corroborate that and might you know, get them

off in their self defense plea. Um. There's a lot of reasons why figuring out the angle is very important, right, agreed, And it's also probably the most scientific of um. Blood pattern analysis math heavy, triggeronometry heavy. Yeah, we tried, we should say, we tried to find a math heavy and I made the mistake of emailing our editorial department to get someone to describe it. And I thought, we're all

half hearted attempt That's why we're writers. So we don't have to do math, especially not triggering out we do now though I think I have this lift, but it's really not that hard. Actually, once I reread anytime. Let's talk about the strings for first, So it is you do? Uh? You do? They do use these strings, elastic strings. Each one represents a drop of blood. So if you have a lot of drops of blood, you're gonna have a lot of strings. It's gonna take a while, right, um.

But you you create a you you find a level, right like you create a level point. You start running strings through the level point from the blood to you know, somewhere else in space, the wall or ceiling, and then all of a sudden, after you start doing a few of these strings, you're gonna find that they all come together at a certain point. And that point is the area of convergence a k a. What was originally a person's head, right, and that's where all the blood came from.

So you're gonna find where where, where they on the ground, where they up high. Um, basically you're creating in real life a three dimensional model of the path this blood took right and where the person was standing, where they were in relationship to the wall, all that stuff. You're probably going to figure out, um, how the person was attacked from what side, that kind of thing. So that's it's it's very important and that's the old school, really

methodical way to do it, right. Yeah, you're gonna explain the trigonomic This is for college boy blood pattern analysts. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, because I'll explain the way I would do it short, okay, which I think is actually how the um how this this article describes it. Well, we'll see how Chuck would do it. Okay. So, um, when blood hits when when blood hits a surface, whether it's drywall or the floor or the ceiling or something like that, if it if it falls or travels uh

straight up and down, it's it's that's a ninety degree angle. Yeah, you're gonna get a little roundrop you get a round drop. But the the stronger the angle right, the more severe the angle, the drop starts to elongate. It's like you know when you skip a stone. It's kind of like that, or when you spill any liquid, And that's another way to put it. So as it um, as it elongates,

it gets longer and thinner. And what you can actually do is take the measurements of each one of these drops, right, and you take let me see if I got this chuck, you take the width right, so obviously we were writers. Anytime this comes up, you take the width and you divide it by the length, and that gives you a number. Yes, this is trigonometry by the way um and you deter you take that number and you use a calculator and

you use the arc sign function. Don't ask us to really explain how to come even in the even in the article like I couldn't find it. And arc sign is the converse of sign or co sign one of those um And basically what you're finding is the angle of a right triangle by taking the opposite side and dividing it by the hypothenuse, and that will give you once you figure out the arc sign of that number

the angle. And that's the college boy way of figuring out the angle that blood traveled from the area of convergence exactly. So a quick example, if you have a two millimeter wide blood stain that's four millimeters long, you divide that and you get point five, and the arc sign of that is thirty. And we figured out the arc sign of five is thirty. Point five is thirty by using that calculator, and thirty would be your angle.

That means a thirty degree angle is is what you're looking at, right, So this is how Chuck would do it. Chuck would get a computer program called No More Strings. I guess they couldn't use no strings attached. That's what I would have called it. Maybe you can make a competing program maybe so, uh, no More Strings is a program that actually creates a three dimensional model and you plug in all your numbers and it does it for you with uh computer animation. And that's I want to

say modern. It is modern, but they do still use a string method um and a lot of times they say that will be more convincing to a jury if they can look at animation. Then hear some nerd uh explain it? In front of them while they're falling asleep exactly. No, I mean I think that's very much the case. That's probably why that software is probably more used than either of the other two methods these days. Yeah, I would call it the jury Swayer program. That's what I would

call it. I would call it the widow Maker. Alright. Uh, a little history, Yeah, we usually cover that first, but we didn't. I think this, U this is a fine article. I like the way it was paced and then laid out. Yeah, very detailed. It's been around actually since the eight nineties. They've been you know, analyzing blood stains and spatter, but

they didn't really start using it until much later. The the first guy I love the name of this book, the first guy from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Poland.

His name was Dr Eduard Pietrowski, wrote a book called concerning the Origin, shape, Direction, and Distribution of the blood Stains following head wounds caused by blows and imagine that was also his uh how we got the ladies alright, telling me wrote that, but showing his book to the ladies, and uh, it would be I think probably about fifty years later that they actually started using these interpretations in court. That guy laid the groundwork for how to do it

at least for a beating. Yeah, for Paul Kirk. Yeah, and Paul Kirk was a physician UM in Ohio. Right. Yeah, there's a case of Samuel Shepard being prosecuted for murder and Dr kirk um figured out from blood spatter analysis where UM Samuel Shepard was when he attacked the victim. Allegedly, Well, he was prosecuted so or convicted, so that's the fact. And then it also showed that UM sam Shephard or that the victim was attacked with by a left handed person.

But I'm assuming Sam Shepard was one the case bamp. Blood spatter analysis is on the map. I wonder what the jury thought about that first, because it means now it's so all over the place, you know, all about the stuff. But the first time someone like recreated a scene and said he was this tall and left handed, were they like, Wow, that's amazing or what are you talking about? I wonder probably why it's amazing, Just like once today, have you heard of the c S I effect? Yeah,

we talked about it, did we. Yeah, it was a long time ago. It was between episode zero and one. But explain it because we have new listeners. Oh well, welcome new listen hey, new listeners, listen up. The c s I effect is basically juries watching things like c s I dexter all this um television ized um blood spatter analysis or forensic science and expecting that so if a prosecutor fails to deliver, that means that the case

isn't all that great. Or conversely, if the prosecutor of the defense can deliver some whiz bang, no more strings, three D graphics of somebody getting shot or not getting shot, the jury is swayed because you know, that's how you weren't that's how you win a case. So, um, there's a there's an expectation that a case has to have that kind of thing. That's the c s I effect.

Someone going that's not how they do it on TV, Yeah exactly, or hey, that's exactly how they do it on TV probably has the reverse effect to You could also just as easily call it the Dancing with the Stars effect the American idol effect, like, well, those are different effects, but they have the same effect. Bleeding, deadening, combing down. Uh, there was a third gentleman Josh and the history of blood spatter analysis Dr Herbert McDonald, And

he came around in the early set. He wasn't born in the early seventies, because I'd be pretty young to be studying this guy thinks the house or blood spatter. My brother worked on that. He came into prominence with blood spatter in nineteen seventy one and wrote a book about it, probably more updated version than the Polish Gentleman. And he started training officers in that and got together at a convention in nineteen eighty three and said to his fellow guys like, yeah, we should start a group.

We just started an organization. Imagine get pretty loaded out of blood spatter I convention. And so they did. They started the International Association of blood Stained Pattern Analysis Analyst. That's a great chuck. I hope I don't get in trouble for that. I don't think you will. Yeah, he was a great guy. He didn't try to murderers earlier. Chamberlain case. Should we go ahead and hit this one? Yeah? You're a fan of Seinfeld. Are you familiar with the

maybe a dink I wake out baby? Yeah? Yeah? Wow. That was Elaine doing her best Meryl Streep who actually said the ding I ate my baby, who was doing her best. Lyndy Chamberlaine, who in real life said a dingo ate my baby. Um, and is what the original line was, and I think Elaine changed it to eight. That's much more severe either way either way. In nineteen eighty in Australia, the Chamberlain family, Richard and Lyndy and their two kids, Zaria and Reagan, were camping Air's Rock

another kid they had third there too. Actually they did it never gets any press, okay, it's like I want to stay out of this. Um. Well, they were camping with their three kids at Air's Rock and apparently, uh Lynda, the mom noticed a dingo near her kid's tent and went over and saw the dingo. I guess it was nighttime running off with something. She said, she couldn't see what, but when she looked at the inside the tent, she saw that the four week old or ten week old

Azaria was missing and that there was blood. So there was a huge search of this park and they found a dingo, layer found the baby's clothes and now bloody and UM basically didn't buy the mom's story or the parents story that it was a dingo. They think that they thought pretty quickly off the bat that there was something fishy, something kinky, as you would say, um, and they started investigating her and kind of under the assumption that this that they framed a dingo, they'd actually murdered

their baby. Yeah. That A couple of the things that happened was they found um. When they found the little jumper, it was not torn that much. It was bloody, but the snaps were closed and it looked as it had been pulled off of a body. Um. The keep key thing that happened was is the mom said, Lindy said, you know, there was a jacket, she had a jacket on, and they didn't find any jacket at all. And Uh.

The other thing that happened was the Yeah, there was a witness, not a witness, but someone nearby camping that obviously when all the bruhaha started, she came over there and she saw the cops pick up the jumper and just fold it and take it away. And even she, I think at the time, thought you probably shouldn't be handling evidence like that. It's not the way to do it. And they didn't photo document the scene right now, big mistake.

They basically mishandled all the evidence in the thing. They were hit cops from Central Australia handling, handling like a huge murder case or a huge death case. Yeah, so they muddled the whole thing to the point where there was just basically a lot of speculation. Uh. They had one expert testify that from the blood stain on the jumper it looked like a throat was cut, and that's

pretty much what sealed her fate to be convicted. Well, what also sealed her fate, um is that she remained very cool and unemotional throughout this trial, and the jury hated her. They did not like her. They didn't understand why a woman could remain collected her baby was dead, let alone when she's being tried for it, you know, if she hadn't really killed the baby. So in addition to just blotched, botched handling, a blood pattern analysis or no,

no real blood pattern analysis. Um, it was you know, her demeanor that helped convict her as well. I want to see that movie. I haven't seen it. I haven't either, I just know about it for some reason. Yeah, Well she got an Academy award nomination, but all she has to do a show up and she gets an Academy work on manation. Not necessarily true, Let's get real. No you bout this point out a stinker of Meryl streeps. I'm just saying she's played the same character a few times.

Oh please, Okay, we won't go down that road. Um. What happened to the Chamberlain's well, she was convicted of murder, and he was convicted right to as well of being an accessory or some a accessory to murder. Right yes, And she was in jail, sent to prison for life. And then three years later her a guy was hiking in a similar area, felt it was death. Oh my god.

And when they went and found his body, he was near a dingo layer, several dingo layers, and they found the missing jacket just by chance, because this guy had fallen to his death. They did that, and I don't, as far as I know, Richard Chamberlayne did not push him to his death so they could find the planted jacket. So they actually said, no, this clears you, guys. We found the jacket years later, covered with blood near dingo layers. Torn.

Sorry you got here's one point three She got one point three mill Australian it pounds Australian dollars Australian units of money, austrillion dollars dollars and apparently that was only about a third of their legal fees. So it's not the happiest ending. Although she did end up out of jail and exonerated. She got to meet Meryl Streep. I imagine, so I wonder if she met Leah Louis Dreyfuss. Probably not, probably not so. Um, that's blood pattern analysis. There's a

lot of really cool graphics and illustrations. Did you see those? And by graphics we don't mean awful awful pictures. There's some pictures of blood and if you read the captions you're like, um, but no, it's not like anything that the average person couldn't handle. Um. But now there's some cool illustrations of how you figure out areas of convergence. That kind of stuff really puts the punch into trigonometry.

That's what how stuff works. Does absolutely type in blood, just blood, it'll bring up a bunch of cool stuff. But if you really want to do a good search, do blood pattern in the search bar. The bloody bleeding gushing search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said bloody bleedy blood what did I say bloody bleeding search part? Since I said that, it means it's time for the listener mail. Josh, I gonna call this uh mlingling monk Housers. Jerry either laughed at that

or she blue snot because she's sick. This is from Brooks, and Brooks says, Hi, guys and Jerry, I've been loving your podcasts for the last few weeks, new new listener. If loving our podcast is wrong, brook doesn't want to be right while he's been driving forty five minutes to a different hospital for his eer rotation. He's a fourth year med student. During the monk Housen podcast, you mentioned m lingering, which made me think of one of the

patients we saw in the e R last week. And he says that this doesn't violate any hippo oath because he doesn't have any like details. At ma'am. I don't know if I believe him, but we'll see. Young guy came in complaining of sudden onset flank pain classic for kidney stones. We asked him for a urine sample to check for microscopic blood. Our first clue that something was up should have been when he asked if we needed to watch him supply the sample. That's only roots sen

procedure and drug testing, not medical testing. When we got the sample from him, it was totally bloody and we knew it was contaminating, so we asked him for a catheterized specimen, and I was totally shocked when he said, Okay, not many people think the catheter. I think he was shocked. Yeah, I think he was shocked by the size of the tube used to get the sample. He nearly jumped off the table during the process, but during his moving an

empty blood vial shook out of his pocket. What we concluded was that he had stolen a vial of his own blood from a lab earlier in the day brought it to the e R with a goal of convincing us he had a kidney stone his secondary gain aside from a lingering painkillers. Yeah, my boss was not amused, though I was. I just thought you'd enjoy hearing about a good solid case of lingering from j D of Scrubs, from Brooks of Josh in predemption. It's a good one. Brooks.

We appreciate thanks for sending that in. That's awesome. Good luck med student, fourth year, fourth year. Good luck in the real world. We're pulling for you. Keep sending us cool stories. My mom was an ear nurse for decades and she always had the best stories ever. Yeah. Um, if you have a good story about probably not too many blood spatter stories. That a good Valentine's Day story. We want to hear it. Wrap it up sending in an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you