We continue our long-running series of mysterious events with the unsolved death of Gloria Ramirez, whose body turned into a chemical weapon, and poisoned doctors who tried to help her and confined her to a wheelchair.
We only see an event like the human body turning into a chemical weapon in a sci-fi movie. But Gloria Ramirez’s last hour in the hospital before she died suggests that the human body can become an extremely dangerous weapon in real life.
Ramirez, who was being treated for cervical cancer, died in a way doctors had never seen before. Let’s take a closer look at this case, where even successive autopsies have yielded no results, and even the doctors and nurses who tried to help Ramirez, who was referred to as the “Toxic Woman” after the death, are on the brink of death.
Ramirez was rushed to hospital after suddenly deteriorating
Gloria Ramirez, a mother of two, was just 31. She was in stage 4 of cervical cancer and was being treated for it. Ramirez’s life changed on February 19, 1994, when he frequently went for doctor’s checks.
The young woman suddenly began to deteriorate on February 19. His heart rate was very fast and he couldn’t breathe regularly. The woman was taken to the emergency room at General Hospital in Riverside and her breathing was getting worse.
It all started when a nurse approached Ramirez.
For Ramirez, who could barely breathe, the entire hospital stood up. One of the nurses stated that an incredibly intense smell of garlic came out of her mouth when she approached the young woman but did not dwell on it too much.
All officials at the hospital performed various procedures to normalize Ramirez’s vital signs. The young woman was injected with a lot of drugs, but none of them worked, and doctors had to hook her up to a defibrillator when Ramirez’s heart rate weakened.
So far everything seemed normal, but when the doctors opened the woman’s shirt to tie the defibrillators, they came across something very interesting. Ramirez had an extremely strange layer of fat in his body. The nurses who saw this took a blood sample from Ramirez’s arm to run some blood tests.
Yellow crystals appeared in Ramirez’s blood
The blood sample was just as interesting as the fat layer on Ramirez’s body. Yellow crystals were crawling through her blood, and she smelled just like ammonia. As doctors tried to figure out what was going on in the young woman’s body, suddenly one of the nurses who was tending to Ramirez collapsed. Although the hospital initially thought the nurse had fainted from exhaustion, another nurse suddenly began to have difficulty breathing and collapsed with another nurse.
The number of nurses fainting suddenly began to increase, and one of the nurses who came to his senses said he could not move his legs and arms. Six people who cared for Ramirez either fainted or were severely ill with symptoms such as temporary paralysis and shortness of breath.
By the end, the number of them had risen to 23, and the doctors took over and asked everyone in Ramirez’s room to get out. “We’re being poisoned, everybody out,” the doctors said, thus preventing worse outcomes. Unfortunately, a doctor who detected yellow crystals in Ramirez’s blood remained in intensive care for a week after the incident and was confined to a wheelchair when he left.
After all this, Ramirez sadly died in hospital. Doctors at the hospital did not understand what had happened to the young woman or the paramedics.
The toxicology team found no trace at the scene.
A special team wearing protective clothing tested for toxicology in the emergency room after arriving at the hospital at first light to retrieve Ramirez’s lifeless body but found nothing. A team specializing in hazardous substances also had to return empty-handed, no matter how much they examined the hospital.
After all the examinations, the young woman’s body was placed in an aluminum coffin with strict measures. An autopsy took place exactly a week after Ramirez’s death. Meanwhile, the press headlined Ramirez, a mother of two, with the headline “Toxic Woman.”
Authorities had to perform three autopsies on the young woman’s body. When an initial autopsy revealed nothing, doctors announced that Ramirez had died of kidney failure due to cervical cancer. However, the report from the initial autopsy was not enough to explain what happened to doctors and nurses at the hospital that day.
After a second autopsy, a high percentage of chemicals were found in Ramirez’s body.
After a second autopsy, doctors found Tylenol, lidocaine, codeine, and tigan substances in Ramirez’s lifeless body. Blood tests during this autopsy also revealed a large number of dimethyl sulfones. Dimethyl sulfone is a chemical that already occurs spontaneously in the human body and then decreases and disappears, but even three weeks after Ramirez’s death, the amount of dimethyl sulfone detected in his blood was three times higher than that found in a normal human body.
Although Ramirez underwent a post-mortem examination, no examination could explain why so many chemicals were found in his blood and body. Doctors said a drug used for cervical cancer caused these damages to the young woman’s body, but Ramirez’s family denied that she was using it– a drug she denies using.
Ramirez’s sister even blamed the hospital, saying her brother would still be alive if the timely intervention had been made. The failure to resolve Ramirez’s case also brought conspiracy theories to the next. The most striking of these theories was that there was a secret methamphetamine laboratory at General Hospital, and Ramirez was poisoned with air coming from the hospital’s vents.
Another allegation detailed Gloria Ramirez being the victim of an experiment the CIA was working on. With the emergence of all these conspiracy theories, the case was not covered up for years, and when the calendars showed 1997, a chemist re-examined the blood samples taken and found that Ramirez had sulfate in his blood even years later.
Even this review years later failed to provide an explanation for Ramirez’s mysterious death. The young woman confined a doctor to a wheelchair, which also cost her her own life, and was later the subject of several productions, such as the X-Files.
