A woman's death became one of the biggest medical mysteries in history when hospital staff around her dropped to the floor and the emergency department had to be urgently evacuated.
Gloria Ramirez, from Riverside, California, was being treated for stage four cervical cancer when she was rushed into Riverside General Hospital on February 19, 1994, with severe heart palpitations. Medical staff attempted to sedate the 31-year-old but when her condition worsened and she started suffering a cardiac arrest, they decided to use a defibrillator.
This was when the hospital staff started to notice something strange. When Gloria's shirt was removed, several ER workers saw what they described as an "oily sheen" covering her body. The doctors and nurses also recalled a "fruity garlic-like" smell coming from Gloria.
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But things became even more bizarre when nurse Susan Kane performed a routine blood test on Gloria and was hit with the smell of ammonia. She handed the blood-filled syringe to Dr Julie Gorchynski, who spotted crystal-like particles floating around it.
Suddenly, Susan passed out and was taken out of the room. Just moments later, Dr Gorchynski began complaining of nausea and quickly left the room before fainting at a nurse's desk outside, then a respiratory therapist who'd been assisting in the room also collapsed.
A total of six members of hospital staff were hospitalised during the bizarre incident, according to The New York Times, while Discover Magazine later reported that 23 ER staff fell ill with at least one symptom— including muscle spasms, convulsions, nausea and fainting. The hospital quickly evacuated the emergency department as a precaution and patients were treated in the car park.
Just a small skeleton crew was left behind to treat Gloria, who has since been dubbed the "toxic lady", but she was sadly declared dead just 45 minutes after arriving at the hospital. A coroner later concluded she died from kidney failure related to end-stage cervical cancer.
It was initially suspected some sort of toxic fumes had caused the hospital staff to become sick so Gloria's body was enclosed in an aluminium container while specialists in hazmat suits searched the emergency room for signs of hazardous chemicals — but they found nothing. Later autopsies on Gloria's body also provided no answers with the coroner describing them as "unremarkable".
California’s Department of Health and Human Services sent two investigators to the hospital and they questioned staff. When they couldn't find anything to suggest fumes had caused the symptoms experienced by workers, they concluded it had been a case of mass hysteria.
The Health Department defined mass hysteria as the occurrence of physical symptoms in a group of people suggesting an organic illness but actually resulting from anxiety or other psychological stresses and their report suggested the odour of the blood sample could have been a trigger. But emergency workers criticised the report — particularly Dr Gorchynski, who was the most seriously injured member of staff and called the conclusion "bulls**t", according to the Los Angeles Times.
She said after the incident that the last thing she remembers was sniffing the syringe of blood. When she woke up she was suffering from symptoms including a headache, muscle spasms and shortness of breath.
Dr Gorchynski was hospitalised for more than two weeks and needed a machine to help her breathe. She developed pancreatitis and also had knee surgery after her knee bone started to deteriorate due to a lack of blood circulation.
Her doctors were adamant her condition was caused by inhaling some sort of toxic fumes as they could find no other reason for her ill health. Dr Gorchynski was convinced the fumes had come from Gloria's blood and ended up filing a $6million lawsuit against the hospital.
But in 1997, a group of scientists from the Laurence Livermore National Laboratory reviewed the case and came up with another theory, suggesting a chemical chain reaction could be to blame. They speculated Gloria may have been using the common solvent dimethyl sulfone, or DMSO, as a home remedy for the pain she was experiencing.
DMSO won't kill humans, but it has been known to produce a garlic-like body odour and is only one oxygen atom away from the highly toxic dimethyl sulfate, which can be extremely hazardous to humans even in small amounts. The researchers suggested that when Gloria was administered oxygen by hospital staff, the DMSO in her bloodstream reacted with the dimethyl sulfone and turned into dimethyl sulfate, which was used as a war gas in World War I.
The scientists noted that the emergency workers' symptoms were "quite consistent" with dimethyl sulphate exposure. But their theory faced backlash from other scientists, who pointed out there had been no other cases where dimethyl sulfone had reacted in a body with surplus oxygen to form dimethyl sulfate.
In their report, the Laurence Livermore National Laboratory scientists also admitted that their theory doesn't prove what happened, but simply suggests a likely cause. To this day no one can be sure exactly what happened and it's likely the medical mystery will remain a mystery.
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