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Halloween Special - The Mysterious Case of Gloria Ramirez

21 October

This week we're doing a Halloween Special. We discuss the many theories around the death of Gloria Ramirez, where 23 hospital workers became mysteriously ill after treating Gloria at the ER. Joe rants about the American healthcare system and Sandra talks about a Russian zombie series that might not have zombies.

The image can be found at allthatsinteresting.com

Joe got his information from:

• Skeptoid.com, by Brian Dunning
• Discover Magazine article, by Richard Stone
• Wikipedia

Sandra got her information from:

• Wikipedia
• Article on straightdope.com, by Cecil Adams
• Article on Medizzy Journal, by Dr Aiman Shahab
• Washington Post article, by Christine Spolar

Audio transcript

Midweek Murders contains graphic and explicit content, listener discretion is advised.

It's happening.

Are you ready?

No, I'm peeing.

It's happening. [Laughter]

[Music]

Hit me with your rhythm dick. That means I'm ready.

Yes, yes. I understand English. I watched a zombie series that might not be a zombie series, might still be about a pandemic. But one guy got stabbed, and I think I've asked you this before, but then they have to stitch him up and they do that by soaking a needle and a thread in 120% vodka.

120%?

Yeah, that's too much isn't it? [Laughter] I think that might just have been the name of the vodka.

Don't need to tell you with your classical language education that percent is latin for out of a hundred.

Maybe it's just a knock off of Absolute, like 120%. [Laughter] Oh well. And I feel like, is that alcohol content in a vodka enough to sterilize a needle and a thread?

Yes.

Yeah. It's wednesday, which means that it's time to talk about crime. You're listening to Midweek Murders, and I'm your host Sandra.

And I'm your enthusiastic co-host Joe.

Today we're gonna do a Halloween special, which means that we're gonna dwelve into some cases that has been unsolved, unresolved or paranormal. We're also going to do that next week, because next week is also before Halloween.

Because October bitches!

This week we're going to talk about the case of Gloria Ramirez. I got my information from wiki wikipedia, journal.medizzy.com...

Do you mean journal?

Yeah, what did I say?

Jooournal.

Jooournal. [Laughter]

Journal.medizzy.com by Dr Aiman Shahab, straightdope.com [Laughter]. Sorry. By Cecil Adams and an article in the washington post by Christine Spolar.

I got mine from an article in discover magazine, a website called skeptoid and an LA times article that I forgot to write down. So I'll have to fish that out afterwards, but the full sources will be available on our website.

So Gloria Ramirez, a 30 (31 year old - correction) year old woman in California, was taken into the emergency department of riverside general hospital by paramedics, as she was suffering from both irregular heart rhythm and irregular breathing. She also had late staged cervical cancer but had not started chemo treatment yet. At the hospital the medical staff injected her with, oh god, diazepam, midazolam, and lorazepam... Almost got it in one. In an effort to sedate her. Which I felt like was a bit of an overkill. Do they usually inject you with three different sedatives?

I don't know, I'm not a doctor. [Laughter]

Fair enough.

I think she had a cocktail because of...I don't think she was particularly responsive to any of the treatments that they tried, so they had to sort of combine it. But benzodiazepines, which all of those three drugs are, are quite common for tachycardia and irregular breathing patterns.

Okay.

Because they make you sleepy.

Sleeeeepy. Gloria didn't seem to be responding to treatment however which led them to defibrillating her. Which is the heart thing, right?

Charging! Clear! Yeah.

Yeah. At which point the nurses noticed an oily sheen covering her body as well as a fruity garlic smell, which I can't think of anything worse a fruity garlic smell.

It's like crumbling some garlic over your custard tart.

As well as a fruity garlic smell, which they guessed emanated from Gloria's mouth. A nurse, Susan Kane, withdrew blood from Gloria and noticed an ammonia smell coming from the tube. She assumed the smell might come from chemo treatment. That's what I read somewhere, which might not be true.

I think because chemotherapy is a technique that targets everything in the body rather than radiotherapy, which is targeted specifically at the tumor, you get cellular death throughout the whole body. So I think it's probably quite common for specific chemotherapies to cause breakdown of cells in the human body, which would lead to ammonium products being in the blood, which is where they attributed the smell to come from.

Okay. And this is noteworthy because she hadn't started her chemotherapy yet even though she had, as it said, late staged cervical cancer. But they might have just caught it late. So she passed a syringe of the blood to Julie Gorchynski, a medical resident, who then saw what appeared to be manila colored particles in the blood. Kane promptly passed out and had to be removed from the room. Gorchynski then began to feel nauseous and left the trauma room to sit down outside, after which she also proceeded to pass out. A respiratory therapist in the trauma room became the third person to pass out, after which a small group of medical staff were left trying to save Gloria's life while the rest of the hospital were evacuated because they thought that something poisonous was happening.

The rest of the emergency room, not the entire hospital.

Oh yeah, that makes sense, sorry. 45 minutes after Gloria had arrived at the ER, she was pronounced dead due to kidney failure, which they correlated to her cancer. So out of the 37 medical staff members who had been in contact with Gloria, 23 of them had fallen ill.

Wasn't it 37 that were working in the ER?

It must have been, right? Otherwise...

Yeah, I think that's a lot of people to tend to one patient.

Yeah, that's true. Although it might have been just people who were in contact with her. So like people taking her from the paramedics to the operating room, people in the operating room....

She didn't go to an operating room.

Well, the trauma room, sorry.

The paramedics take them there.

Oh yeah, that doesn't make sense. So I'm not sure. So now I have several different theories as to what may have happened around Gloria Ramirez. Do you have anything you want to say now or should we dwelve into the theories?

Or forever hold your piece. You could talk about the first investigation that decided it was mass hysteria.

Oh yeah.

Or is that one of your theories?

It's one of my theories, so I can...

Okay, then yeah, plow straight on.

Okay so California's health department put two scientists, Drs Ana Maria Osorio and Kirsten Waller, in charge of trying to figure out what happened. These scientists theorized that the staff at the ER had suddenly become victims of mass hysteria, as their symptoms didn't match and because their blood tests afterwards had been normal.

The main point that they found, what they reasoned for it to be an outbreak of mass hysteria, is that the paramedics who initially treated Gloria had no symptoms at all. Didn't come down with anything, they were completely unaffected. They also said that the majority of the people that came down with symptoms were women, and historically women are more subjected to falling under mass hysteria, which I chortled at a little bit.

Was that what it said?

Yeah. I think it was a journal article in a psychology journal in 2002, so it was peer-reviewed and properly evaluated, that said that women are more likely to be susceptible to bouts of mass hysteria.

Okay. I also read that more women than men, that had been around the area of Gloria Ramirez, did come down with symptoms. But I don't really get it, because I don't think hardened nurses would just come down with like: "oh I fainted in a trauma room". They're in trauma rooms for the majority of their working lives.

Well that's what the lady who spent the time in the ICU said, and she actually sued the hospital for the diagnosis of mass hysteria saying exactly that. They're hardened medical professionals.

Yeah.

They're not gonna swoon and faint at the sight of blood or a funky smell. Like how many drunks go to the ER and vomit on a medical professional.

Yeah. People who are in labor they shit themselves all the time. Like, I worked as a elderly home carer, I guess is the word, or something like that, and the smells that I came across still lingers in my mind.

Emergency rooms can get anything. They could have patients with gangrene, they could have burns victims, they could.... Like there's no way that these medical professionals would have fallen to mass hysteria because of a bit of an oily sheen and an ammonium spell.

It doesn't make sense to me. But what also doesn't make sense, or what doesn't lend to this theory, is that Gorchynski had spent two weeks afterwards in intensive care with liver inflammation as well as bone tissue death problems.

I don't think necrosis and hepatitis are conditions that are typically psychosomatic, no.

And also, it can't just happen both at once, as like, an accident? Well statistically I'm guessing it can, but I'm leaning towards that it might not be a sound theory because of that. Because I feel like, that's too much of a coincidence to happen right after treating Gloria.

Now I will safely say that I think the mass hysteria diagnosis is absolute nonsense.

Yeah, I felt like that was improbable, yeah. They also found in that investigation, people who had shown the most severe symptoms had all worked within two feet of Gloria or handled her intravenous lines and...

Venus. You could just call it IV.

Okay. Which also kind of lends to the fact that it wasn't mass hysteria. But that's what they found. So theory number two is: the hospital had a history of hazardous gas leaks. Well, gas leaks they say, but it might have been a sewage problem. Because in April 1993, California occupational safety and health administration notified the hospital that the first floor emergency room was flooded with sewer gas from a drain. A citation was issued even before that, in 1991, when two employees sought medical treatment after a possible leak of hazardous gas from a sterilizer. Which, I'm not entirely sure what it is?

A machine that's used to sterilize surgical equipment.

So that was in that context, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with that, okay. So in 1992...[Laughter]. In 1992, the hospital was notified that an inspection had found algae growing in a water resorvo... reservoir. And the doctor treating Gloria had noticed some weird fluid in a sink and then when the staff started fainting, he flushed that fluid down the drain, because he was afraid that it might have something to do with it. I'm not sure how much that theory has anything to do with it. But another patient at the hospital before that, had said that he was evacuated from his room like a couple of times, because they said that there was something wrong with like the sewage. Did you read anything about this?

Nope.

No, okay. So it might not even be a thing, I don't know.

I don't think either sewage gases or algae cause the same range of symptoms. I know sewage gas can cause nausea and dizziness and things like that, the same as breathing in any gas because it displaces the oxygen, but if it were to be sewage gas it would have affected everyone.

Yeah.

All of the medical staff, all of the other patients. If it were the algae then it would have affected anyone who would have used that sink, and if it's a sink in an emergency department it's probably going to be used by all of the medical staff. So again, why is it only affecting some of them and not others?

Yeah, that's true. The third theory is that Gloria Ramirez takes painkillers, which are shortened as DMSO. Do you know what that is?

Dimethyl sulfoxide.

Ooooh. Which was readily available at the time, I think, but then they took it away from the market because they were worried that it might cause eyesight problems?

Yeah. It was originally issued as a medication, as a topical analgesic. So a painkiller that you apply to your skin rather than ingest...

So it's a cream?

More like a gel.

Oh yeah.

After a clinical trial showed that it was affecting people's eyesight the FDA, the food and drugs administration in America, took it off of the medical market, but it can still be bought from hardware stores. And this is slightly concerning, why people would buy their medication from a hardware shop. It's an excellent degreaser. So people working in mechanics that get covered in grease doing oil changes and things like that, rub a bit of dimethyl sulfoxide on you gets rid of it, lovely job. So it can still be bought from hardware shops for that purpose, but it's not advised to be used medically anymore.

But was that the case at the time?

Yes. So it was basically a home remedy that she was using it for.

Okay, but like, the likelihood of her knowing about it as a home remedy, would you say that it was probable?

I see no reason to believe that it wouldn't be, given that it was established as a medical treatment previously, and we're not talking like 50 years previously, but maybe a couple. And people can get very creative when it comes to home remedies for terminal...

Pain.

Or, yeah, chronic cases of pain.

Yeah, okay. So before she died, due to a urinary blockage, the DMSO builds up in her bloodstream and then oxygen administered by the paramedics converts the DMSO in her blood to DMSO2. I'm not sure what that is, but...

DMSO isn't its chemical name, it's basically an abbreviation. So dm: dimethyl, and sulfoxide: so. When the pure O2 gets administered to help with her breathing, it would have undergone a chemical reaction to add an extra O2 molecule, or an extra oxygen molecule rather than an extra O2. So just one oxygen. So it becomes dimethyl sulfone.

Okay.

So it goes from sulfoxide to sulfone.

All right. So when that blood is drawn out in the syringe, and then is cooled to a room temperature, crystals form. Which is what the nurse saw, is what they're hypothesizing. And then it's converted into dimethyl sulfate, no?

Mm-hmm. But not outside of the body, inside. And they think that the defibrillation would have caused that.

Oh, okay. They thought that the electricity caused that?

I guess. There's a lot of counter theories about how it could have converted from sulfone to sulfate. The people that did the original investigation thought that it would have happened naturally, some other scientists read their paper and said that that was impossible.

Okay.

But again, with this kind of science and new cases, without testing it in vitro, in the body, you don't know what kind of chemical reactions can happen or will happen under what circumstances. So it's possible that it was from the defib, it could have happened naturally without the defib, but the theory is that it changed from sulfone to sulfate at some point.

So what I read then, was that dimethyl sulfate can cause convulsions, delirium, paralysis and damage heart, liver and kidneys.

Yeah. It's a nerve gas.

Yeah. Has it been used like as a nerve gas?

Apparently, the US have never used it, but as to how much trust you put in that, I will let you be the judge. But they do know that 10 minutes of exposure to 0.5 grams of dimethyl sulfate in a centimeter cubed, can kill.

Oh god, that's so little.

Yeah so it's pretty vicious. And like you said, affects liver, kidney, heart. It can cause cell death in exposed tissues. So you don't even need to breathe in or ingest it, or anything like that, it can start killing your cells just from being in contact on the outside of your skin. You can start... Your skin can start dying. So like all nerve gases, it's pretty nasty stuff.

Yeah. Which does kind of lead to the theory of that being what happened, because the people around her got symptoms.

People around got symptoms, the people that dealt with her IV and were closest to her suffered the most, which makes sense. The symptoms all fit in convulsions, paralysis and one of the nurses said that she couldn't move her arms. The hepatotoxicity could have caused the hepatitis in the nurse in the ICU.

Yeah, which is liver problems.

Hepatitis, yeah. Everybody knows what hepatitis is. [Laughter]

Sorry.

And also the necrosis in her knees, the cell death in her knees, that she particularly suffered from could have also been caused by that. The only thing that doesn't match, which the guys that did the investigation did comment on, was the nausea. So apparently, it doesn't cause any symptoms of nausea.

Yeah?

But if you're being ravaged from the inside out by a nerve gas, then maybe that will make you feel a bit ill.

Yeah. I feel like I can feel nauseous about all kinds of things.

The smell of ammonia can cause nausea in some people. So yeah, I don't think that's a thing that can be ruled out just because it's not a symptom of nerve gas poisoning.

Yeah. And also, one other thing that I've read that might not lend to this theory is that they couldn't find any traces of dimethyl sulfate anywhere afterwards.

And I think that would have come down to the fact that it would have been in small quantities, even though they found high quantities of the first dimethyl, the DMSO, before it underwent all of the chemical changes. They found a lot of that.

Did they?

Yeah, I can get onto that in a bit. So it's possible that one: they weren't specifically looking for it. So I know that the hazmat team went in looking for certain things, they didn't do a broad sweep, they were looking for specific things. So they could have missed it and then later could have broken down into sulfates and the chemical reaction could have reversed, or it could have degraded, could have been cleaned away. So again, I wouldn't say that just because they didn't find any dimethyl sulfate directly in the ER would mean that it wasn't what happened.

Okay. I understand what happens here, but how did they find DMSO?

So they did an analytical technique called headspace GCMS, GCMS being gas chromatography mass spectrometry, and headspace is basically... So they took samples from the autopsy from all of her organs and I think they used her blood as well. They probably used a more technical method but when I was at university and did headspace GC, basically you put your compound (in this case the autopsy tissue. We used a paint tin, that's how high-tech we were. Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge) and you tie a bit of charcoal to string. Put that at the top of the paint tin and close the lid on top. So if you imagine the inside of your paint tin, you've got the bottom of the tin, you've got your sample on the top and then a bunch of air, and then a dangling bit of charcoal. Then you heat up the painting to hundreds of degrees, what that does is basically volatilize all of the small chemicals that are in your sample. So all of your volatile compounds are made into a gas, those gases are absorbed by the charcoal. You then take your bit of charcoal and put it in a solvent, we used methanol but any solvent will do, and you basically dissolve out your compounds of interest from the charcoal into that liquid. That liquid then gets injected onto the GCMS, and the way a GCMS works is that your sample gets injected, the sample gets vaporized again by the GC into a gas. The gas gets carried along what's called a mobile phase until it gets to a column and the column will separate out all of your compounds depending on how reactive they are, what their charge is, basically: chemistry shit. But a larger molecule will stay on the column for longer, smaller molecules come off the column faster, etc etc. So you get a nice what's called a chromatogram, so it's lots of peaks on a graph that are unique for certain compounds. Then it gets passed to the mass spec side where it gets bombarded with a bunch of electrons. The electrons will charge your molecule at different rates depending on how reactive it is, and that will then give another mass spectra. And the interesting part about mass spec is that it is completely unique for each compound, so you can't mistake a mass spectrum fragment for something else. It will be 100% identified, or it will be unidentified because you haven't got it in your library. Basically...[Gets interrupted]

Go on.

It's definitely conclusive that she herself had put DMSO on where she had pains? No?

Yeah. So the results of the GCMS found lidocaine - a very strong painkiller, paracetamol, codeine - also another very strong painkiller, trimethobenzamide - which is an antiemetic so it's used to help you feel less nauseous. That was probably given by the doctors in the ER. And they found dimethyl sulfone. The interesting part is that GCMS can also tell you how much of that substance is there, not just what it is. And what they found was there was three times as much dimethyl sulfone in the samples as there was codeine.

Okay.

She was never administered codeine in the ER, so she was obviously taking the lidocaine, paracetamol, codeine for pain. But she was also taking the dimethyl sulfone for pain, and it was found three times as much as the painkillers that she was taking. So it was definitely there 100%, they identified it and it was definitely there in a massive quantity.

That does make sense.

Science, bitch!

I didn't know this. From what I read about, like the articles and stuff... I think that if they had been like: "okay, your chronic pain can be alleviated by this" I would probably slather it all over.

I have no reason to disbelieve that Gloria heard somewhere, from a friend or advertising or remembered from when it was a product, that DMSO is a topical analgesic. She's in a lot of pain from a late stage cancer.

Yeah.

She would try it, I have no doubt about that.

It does make sense. For you listeners out there, I do have a gel that I got from you that I have been slathering on my back. I wouldn't think twice about not using it.

Yeah, it's exactly the same thing isn't it? A topical gel that you've heard from somebody can be helpful, so you're using it, you're trying it. So even though her family claimed that she wasn't using it, one, would they really know? Is it like...

Yeah. My family wouldn't know.

Yeah. It's just a gel that she's using for pain relief, like is that something that you would share with everyone? Not necessarily.

Probably not, no.

And then also the GCMS results proved it.

That's an interesting point actually, because I didn't know that they proved that she had used it. I thought it was hypothetical.

Either that, or the samples that were recovered from the autopsy have been contaminated with dimethyl sulfone. It's possible, because DMSO can be used as a solvent in chemistry. But I'm fairly sure that the lab that performed this are professional enough to have realized if dimethyl sulfone was showing up on their GCMS results and it was part of their sample prep. They would know that.

Yeah, we can hope.

Well they were involved in doing testing during the cold war. The whole company was developed to help test nuclear warheads, so they're a robust scientific group. I would think they know what they're doing, and so I would say, contamination issues are probably not a significant factor.

Yeah. And the fourth theory is that the Los Angeles weekly New Times, which might be the one that you've been looking at maybe?

I don't know.

Had a possible alternative explanation. And they theorized that the hospital where the incident occurred, the riverside general hospital, might have been the site of a secret lab. And this is...

Oh yeah! I've read about this. I just rolled my eyes at this.

Did you?

Yeah.

Okay. And they theorized that it was a lab used to illegally manufacture methamphetamine. So they're saying that, at the time, meth chemicals might have been smuggled out of the hospital in IV bags. So what they're suggesting is that one of the IV bags containing methamphetamine was hooked up to the dying Gloria Ramirez which triggered the round of nausea, headache and other symptoms. Because the smells and symptoms are classic to meth fume exposure. This, I'm not sure about.

Yeah, this is the one I rolled my eyes at. For one, the whole theory of this is leaning on nurses being used to smuggle the IV bags out of the hospital. Now, maybe in a run-down hospital in the suburbs of the middle of nowhere, but this is quite a big hospital in California. I find it hard to believe that medical professionals could be bribed, particularly in California because they're so health conscious.

I don't know, a lot of like... I don't believe...

I mean, I get that health professionals are underpaid and overworked but... Come on, I was a health professional.

I know.

I have more faith in my transatlantic colleagues than this theory lends to.

Yeah. I understand, but also the part where they would have smuggled out like IV bags and stuff like that isn't that weird for me. Like...

Okay, we'll try a different tact then. If one of these mandy bags was hooked up to Gloria intravenously, she would have died instantly from an overdose.

Okay.

Then her GCMS results would have a ridiculously high methamphetamine peak, which was not commented on. She was admitted into the hospital with an irregularly fast heartbeat and breathing problems.

Yeah.

If they hooked her up to IV, that would have just skyrocketed. Methamphetamine is a stimulant, so it's just gonna make her heartbeat even faster. She's gonna struggle for breath even more. They would have realized that she was deteriorating, whereas she didn't deteriorate, she just didn't recover.

Wasn't that what they said? Like she wasn't responsive to treatment?

She wasn't responsive to treatment. But have you ever taken a caffeine tablet?

No.

Okay. So a lot of people when they're studying for exams will take a caffeine tablet to like give them a boost and whatever. You take too many of them you start getting shaky, you start sweating, you can't concentrate, everything is like on hyperdrive. If you're already suffering from tachycardia and you get administered an IV stimulant, your heart's going to explode. So if she was administered IV methamphetamine, her cause of death would not have been kidney failure.

Okay.

Her chest would have literally exploded.

Okay.

And by literally I mean figuratively. [Laughter]

Good to know. Mostly for me, as someone who doesn't know shit about shit, like science and stuff... Well I know some, but not a lot. [Laughter]

I can do science, me.

Yeah, a little bit. A little bit, but not a lot. The thing that speaks against this theory for me, the most, is that the fumes would probably not cause bone tissue death.

I don't think they would cause any kind of... I don't even understand where this fume theory could come from. The IV drip doesn't get turned on until the IV is placed. So the cannula gets put in her hand or her elbow, or whatever vein, then they turn on the drip. And up to that point the bag is sealed, there's no way for fumes to even dissipate. And if they did, why has something like this not been seen before?

Yeah.

Because surely they've just got bags of liquid meth sitting around in their secret bunker. Just doesn't make any kind of sense, either medically or scientifically.

I don't think it was a...

And I'm speaking as an expert on both. [Laughter]

I don't think they meant like in a secret bunker, I think they meant the doctors and the nurses were getting a bit of money from the side, you know? Like...

Yeah, but it had to have been made in the hospital, otherwise what's the point in the hospital being involved. So if it was made in the hospital, it would have had to have been made in a lab, if it was made in the lab there are stringent tests that are taken by labs to be given accreditation to be able to perform certain tests. So one, they would have picked it up under those, two, there's no way for these fumes to have come out from an IV bag anyway. So that's just ridiculous. Three, if they were gonna have leaking bags, or whatever, that would have happened in the lab and therefore people in the lab would have also suffered from these conditions. Which has never been reported, ever.

Okay. I get what you mean, but also, in America all kinds of weird shit is going on.

I know they like to cook their own meth, I'm not disputing that at all. I've watched Breaking Bad. I actually haven't.

Me neither. It doesn't make sense...

At all.

I don't know. I feel like maybe I'm especially biased because I've read so much...

Because Trump sucks.

I've read so much shit about like America and their health system, but I'm like: "let's just..."

Well, their health system is fucked, because it's all about money. But that doesn't stop it from being heavily audited and regulated. So while I'm completely in agreement with you in that the American healthcare system is one of the worst in the world. And interestingly, related but unrelated, the United States have the worst record for deaths during pregnancy in the developed world.

Oh shit!

But that's because of money. They will turn people away at the door who are dying, who don't have insurance.

Yeah. I think I've read about this, and I think I read about it as like statistically more people of color die from childbirth in America.

I wouldn't be surprised by that at all. So all of you American bots that are listening, vote Biden and bring back obamacare.

The thing is, we have mostly American listeners at this point.

Vote Biden.

No I mean like: "oops".

I mean like, unashamedly, your health care system sucks.

No it does, it does. And the thing is...

And your orangutang of a president is making it worse. Vote Biden. Affordable care act is the only way you people, who are not rich, will be able to get healthcare.

Yeah, and not rich means not a millionaire.

If you give birth in the United States, not only does it cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on if anything goes wrong, they charge you for skin to skin contact with your child.

That's crazy.

If you want to hold your baby after you have just popped it out of your birth canal, that you have been carrying for nine months, they charge you for it. For a thing that you have made. That's just fucking ridiculous.

Yeah. In Sweden it's zero dollars.

Yeah. Give birth in the UK, how much do you pay? Nothing.

Yeah because you fucking carried it, why would it cost you?

Need an operation, okay. Serious quadruple heart bypass, all right, no problem. Free of charge.

Yeah because we pay taxes, and it's fine.

Need a kidney transplant, fine. Free of charge. Gonna be on medication for the rest of your life? No problem, free of charge.

Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy, it's crazy. I can't even imagine it. And the fact that people won't call the ambulance...

An ambulance. Yeah. I never realized when I was younger why so many films and tv programs have pregnant women in the back of a taxi going to a hospital and it's because the taxi ride is cheaper than an ambulance.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Do you know how much it is for a ride to the hospital in an ambulance in the UK? Free of charge.

Yeah. Which is what it should be, because that's why we fucking paid taxes. True story bruh.

Ridiculous. Rant over, vote Biden.

What are you gonna do now?

Nothing.

Nothing.

I think I'm gonna try and read.

I think I'm gonna probably take my meds.

And your creams and your creams, don't forget your creams.

I've already done them. Ba bam.

Smart, smart.

I think I'm probably gonna watch some more of the Russian zombie series that might not be a zombie series.

Or Russian.

I'm like four episodes or five episodes in, I'm still not sure if there's gonna be zombies, but I'm holding out for them.

Holding out for a hero.

Smooch Ollie in his face for me.

Never!

Okay. Thank you so much for listening to Midweek Murders, we'll see you next week with another Halloween special.

Bye!

Topics

• Gloria Ramirez
• Mysteries
• unsolved mysteries
• unexplained cases
• medical mysteries
• medical case study
• mass hysteria
• American healthcare system
• dimethyl sulfate
• nerve gas
• Chemical accident
• gas chromatography mass spectrometry