Hi, thanks for having me on. I've been researching medical anomalies for about fifteen years now, and there's one case I keep coming back to. It happened in 1994, at Riverside General Hospital in California. A young woman named Gina Reyes was brought into the emergency room, and what happened next, well, it's unlike anything in medical history. I've read every report, every theory, and I still can't fully explain it. Nobody can. Gina was only thirty-one years old. She had late-stage cervical cancer, and on the evening of February 19th, her boyfriend called 911 because she'd been vomiting all day and was getting worse. Paramedics brought her in around eight fifteen at night. She was semiconscious, confused, breathing rapidly, heart racing. The staff started standard treatment immediately. Sedatives, heart medication, an IV drip. Nothing unusual at that point. A respiratory therapist named Maureen later said the only odd thing was Gina's age. Patients with those symptoms, the difficulty breathing, the irregular heartbeat, they're usually elderly. But Gina was young. That struck the staff as strange, but not alarming. Not yet.
Then Gina's condition deteriorated. Her blood pressure was dropping, her heart wouldn't stabilize. The staff tried to defibrillate her, and that's when things got weird. Several people noticed an oily sheen on her skin. Others smelled something fruity, almost like garlic, coming from her mouth. And here's the thing, when a nurse named Sarah drew blood from Gina's arm, she noticed a chemical smell coming from the tube. Like ammonia. She passed the syringe to a medical resident, Dr. Janet, who saw something even stranger. There were particles floating in the blood. Manila-colored crystals, just drifting in the syringe. nurses talked about this case for years - Devin'Sarah leaned closer to try to find the source of the smell, and then she collapsed. Just dropped. They carried her out of the trauma room on a gurney. A few minutes later, Dr. Janet started feeling lightheaded. She walked to a nurse's desk, and before she could even answer whether she was okay, she fainted too. Then the respiratory therapist Maureen went down. When she woke up, she couldn't control her limbs. They were just jerking on their own. That's three medical professionals unconscious within minutes. The hospital declared an internal emergency. They evacuated every patient in the emergency room to the parking lot outside.
A skeleton crew stayed behind to try to save Gina. They worked on her for forty-five minutes. CPR, defibrillation, everything they could do. At eight fifty at night, she was pronounced dead. Kidney failure from her cancer, officially. But by then, twenty-three people who'd been near her were sick. Five were hospitalized. Dr. Janet, the one who saw the crystals, she spent two weeks in the ICU. Two weeks. She developed hepatitis, breathing problems, and something called avascular necrosis in her knees. That's where bone tissue dies from lack of blood. She was on crutches for months afterward. A hazmat team swept the emergency room that night. They tested for hydrogen sulfide, phosgene, every toxic gas you can imagine. They found nothing. The coroner's office was terrified to do the autopsy. They wore airtight moon suits and worked in a sealed chamber. They took ninety minutes, which is incredibly fast for an autopsy. And they found nothing unusual. No poison, no pathogen, nothing that could explain what happened. The state health department eventually called it mass hysteria. Can you believe that? Twenty-three people, trained medical professionals, and they said it was all in their heads. Dr. Janet and the other affected staff were furious. Mass hysteria doesn't put someone in intensive care for two weeks. And here's the thing, it doesn't cause bone necrosis.
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