Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Dave. Let's get to it. No need for further explanation, let's just start. Let's go today February, thirty one year old woman brought into a hospital in Riverside, California named Gloria Ramirez. I like where this is going so far, Chuck, it's succinct, it's to the point. It was for for sixty seconds. She had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. But that's not why she was there. She was brought to
the hospital because her heart was super beating. It was beating out of her chest such that the chambers were not filling with blood. That was lowering the volume that her heart was pumping to the rest of her body, and her blood pressure was plummeting, and it was very dangerous and very strange for a thirty one year old woman, right, Um,
But like you said, she had cervical cancer. So they were like, okay, well, let's just figure this out and we'll treat her and we'll just life saving measures and do what we can for And so the e er staff started working on her like they would any other patient. Um,
but they were unsuccessful in bringing her back. In less than an hour, she was pronounced dead by the head of the e R. But it's what took place during that hour that has created a lasting mystery since February that remains unsolved to this day because by the time the head of the e R pronounced Gloria Ramire is dead, the entire emergency room, all of the patients, and almost all of the staff had moved out to the parking lot had evacuated the emergency room because they wanted to
get as far away from Gloria Ramires as absolutely possible. Right, So, uh, the first thing that happened was they noted that they drew some blood, and they noticed that the blood smelled like ammonia, which is not what blood smells like. They started looking closer and they found these crystals had solidified within the syringe in the blood. Um. They were called Manilla crystals. I looked for twenty minutes on what manilla crystals are and couldn't find it. Well, no, they were
Manila colored crystals. Okay, well that makes sense then, yeah, uh, she the Mr. Ramirez was she herself was emitting an odor on her breath. It was they described it as garlicky and fruity, and then her her body was seemingly covered in an oily sheen. So so far that's not too bad or whatever. But the first big problem that they had, aside from those flex and her her blood the syringe full of blood, was that the nurse who had drawn the blood fainted in the er, which is
pretty unusual. But even more unusual is that the nurse that she handed the syringe too, also fainted, staggered out of the room, sat down at a nurse's station desk, and just slumped over dead away. Also super weird. But it got even weirder. A third nurse and then ultimately a fourth nurse all fainted um passed out. One of them started wretching from nausea, all seemingly because of Gloria Ramira. Something was happening with Gloria Ramirez in her body that
was making the e Er staff sick. And this was highly unusual, and that's about when they evacuated the e Er to get everybody as far away from Gloria ramiras as possible. Yeah, in the end, twenty three of the thirty seven people on staff in the e R had at least one odd symptom arranging from tremors to apnea. Uh. One of them even was an intensive care for two weeks. Pancreatitis, hepatitis like weird things is like an X Files episode. Basically, Yeah, that one nurse had all all all of those were
in one nurse. Hepatitis, pancreatites, and something called a vascular necrosis, which is where the bone becomes starved of oxygen and starts to die. And this was concentrated on her knees. This is not supposed to happen when you're just you know, administering routine life saving measures to somebody who's having atrial fibrillation. Right, So what they did was they said, let's um seal the body in a bag. Let's seal that body bag and an aluminum box, and let's then seal that in
a room until hazmat can get here. Has Matt arrived that night, and they said, you know, when we go to check this out, we assume we're going to find some kind of toxic gas because everyone's getting sick here. And it got even weirder when they discovered that Gloria Ramirez was not emitting any kind of toxic gas. Yeah, they expected to find something like um seward gas, maybe something coming from the e er and not necessarily Gloria Ramirez or phosgene gas, which can produce all sorts of
horrible symptoms as well. And they found nothing, not just on her body, nothing in the bag, nothing in the box that they sealed her in, nothing in the room. There was just nothing. And yet she had made twenty three of the thirty seven emergency room staff sick, so something had happened. But now they're like, Okay, we've got a modern medical mystery on our hands. Should we take a break. I think we should. All right, We'll be right back, all right. So the has Matt team checks
out Gloria Ramirez. Nothing unusual going on. Not only no weird gases. Uh, there were no viruses, no bacteria. They couldn't find any kind of biological source. And so they said she died of heart failure brought on by kidney failure, which was brought on by this cancer. But everyone's getting sick, so they said, we need to up our game here
and bring in uh Quincy. Pretty much, they brought in someone from Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and they had better equipment, and they were basically charged with sampling tissue and sampling blood and finding out just what had happened to her. Yeah, and so they found a lot of stuff that they expected to find, but they found three things that stood out to them. One was A means, which are a
metabolite of ammonia. Another thing called niko tinamedes, which is a B vitamin that you sometimes find in drugs because it can produce euphoria and drug dealers will use it to extend their supply some um. And the third one is dimethyl sulfone, which is a metabolite of an amino. Asaid that the body is usually capable of breaking down, so it was an unusual thing to find even though it's found in the body, it's usually broken down and wouldn't have shown up on a test, which means that
there was a lot of dimethyl sulfone in Gloria Ramirez's body. Yeah, and that's what they honed in on. The A means, they said, is probably from breaking down from some drug that we gave her because we were giving her cocktails of drugs to try and stabilize her. We weren't. But the e er was the second one. They said, well, this is quite a leap in my opinion, that suggested maybe she was using PCP, right, even though they didn't
find any PCP in her system. But at any rate, they decided to focus on the third one, the dimethyl sul phone, which uh seemed to make a little bit more sense than the other two at least, right, and I mean like it was, it was written off much less easily than the other two, so it was the one that was kind of left over. And one of the researchers that Lawrence Livermore, said, Hey, dimethyl sulfhone. That's
a type of sulfur with a single oxygen bond. But hey, get this, if you add two oxygen molecules to to this type of sulfur, you get dimethyl um sulf fox side, and that's something that people use as like a topical pain reliever. Maybe Gloria Ramirez was using this dimethyl sulf ox side as a topical pain reliever, because didn't you say that her skin was oily, So maybe that's where
it came from. And everyone said, hey, that's great, but still there's nothing toxic um that could knock out an entire e er from dimethyl sulfone or dimethyl sul fox side yes, but they said, oh, some chemical nerds stood up. He said, but get this. You add four oxygen molecules and it's just crazy how a couple of molecules can make something deadly. But you add four and you're gonna get dimethyl sulfate. And that is if is a substance that, if it's in gaseous form, can kill you in ten minutes.
And they went, oh, yep, okay, this makes a lot more sense because there can be a burning sensation, there can be tissue death and the eyeballs and mucus membranes. It can lead to paralysis and coma and convulsions, and suddenly it starts to come into form a little bit right. Solawrence Livermore went to the corner of Riverside, California, and said, here's what we think. We can't prove this, but here's
the best theory we've come up with. Gloria Ramirez was using dimethyl sulfoxide d M s O as a topical pain reliever for her cervical cancer, and when she was brought in for heart failure, the paramedics and the e er staff started flooding her system with oxygen. Well, that oxygen combined with breaking down dimethyl dimethyl sulf ox side managed to combine into dimethyl sulfate, and that turned into some sort of gas that emitted from her that poisoned
the e er staff. And everybody said, okay, good enough, that's the best anyone to come up with, kind of I mean, that was a decent theory, but they couldn't show the exact um pathway that that might have taken and why her body would have converted that sul phone into sulfate. It was a good guess, but they couldn't prove it necessarily, and they still can. It's still unpre even but some people say, well, this is just like no one's ever demonstrated how it happened, but this is
probably what happened, say a lot of people. And the symptoms didn't exactly match because we mentioned some of the UH doctors and nurses suffered nausea and wretching, and apparently sulfate doesn't produce those symptoms. And nobody said, my eyes burned or my mucous membrane burns, which would be like the primary symptom, and everybody in the room would have it if one person was affected from being in close quarters with Gloria Ramirez like that, that's just what would
happen first, And so the symptoms not matching. And then on top of that, the fact that Gloria Ramires his family said she never used d M s O kind of shoots some holes into this theory. So over time, the fact that this has remained a mystery has allowed some other ideas to kind of float to the surface too. Yeah, mass hysteria, which is I think that's just a go
to anytime something happens you can't explain. Yeah, but it was it was particularly sexist to because they're like, look, it was mostly female nurses who were subject to this,
so of course it was mass hysteria, right of course. Uh. And then this one is really interesting to me and also not true, but an urban legend arose that the on the hospital staff there were some people smuggling ingredients for meth amphetamine manufacturing through the E R and I V bags, so a little breaking bad operation going through there, and that one of the staff accidentally gave her an I V bag with these meth amphetamine ingredients and that
produced this toxicity. Ye, pretty interesting stuff. I mean, probably not the case, but it's still I mean, you can float interesting ideas like that because it's still not proven. Agreed, may never be. Well, that's the case of the toxic corpse of Gloria Ramirez. May she rest in peace? Uh And since I said may she rest in peace, that means that this short stuff is over right, Chuck, That's right. The short stuff out. Stuff you Should Know is a
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