About 8:15 in the evening on February 19, 1994, paramedics wheeled a young woman into the emergency room of General Hospital in the southern California city of Riverside. The woman was awake, but she responded to questions with only brief and sometimes incoherent utterances. She was taking shallow, rapid breaths. Her heart was beating too rapidly to allow its chambers to fill before they pumped, so her blood pressure was plummeting. Most patients who show up in an emergency room with such symptoms are elderly people: this woman, the paramedics reported, was 31 years old and had cervical cancer. Her name was Gloria Ramirez.
The medical staff hovering over Ramirez injected her with a host of fast-acting drugs that were part of the standard protocol for her condition, along with eventual mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When it became clear that Ramirez was responding poorly to treatment, the staff tried to defibrillate her heart with electricity. They stripped off her shirt and pressed padded electrodes against her chest; at that point several people saw an oily sheen covering Ramirez’s body, and some noticed a fruity, garlicky odor that they thought was coming from her mouth.
To obtain blood for analysis, a registered nurse named Susan Kane swabbed Ramirez’s right arm with rubbing alcohol, inserted a catheter, and attached a syringe. As the syringe filled, Kane noticed a chemical smell to the blood.
Kane turned toward the door of the trauma room and swayed. Kane said that her face was burning, and she was put on a gurney and taken from trauma one.Shortly after, several other staff members began to get similar symptoms, their limp bodies slumping to the floor.
That surreal night would throw Riverside General Hospital into newspapers and tv news broadcasts for weeks, as the frightening possibility of a human body releasing toxic fumes captured the public’s imagination. It also triggered one of the most extensive investigations in forensic history—medical detectives from ten local, state, and federal outfits examined dozens of potential culprits, from poisonous sewer gas to mass hysteria. So far, all the suspects have beaten the rap, except for one extraordinary hypothesis: a team of researchers think that a chain of chemical reactions may essentially have turned Gloria Ramirez’s body into a canister of nerve gas.
A skeleton crew stayed behind to help save Ramirez’s life. Her blood pressure continued to drop, and her pulse was growing fainter. Ochoa and three others repeatedly administered electric shocks and drugs, but their efforts to stabilize Ramirez failed. At 8:50 she was pronounced dead.
She has since been dubbed “the toxic woman”.
Click picture for the Wiki article.
Submitted by czigany
(via winifredjay)
