The Toxic Lady

In 1994, a woman came into a California ER dying of symptoms related to her cancer. When her blood was drawn, it smelled of ammonia and had manila-colored particles floating in it. Three people exposed to the blood fainted.

The woman died later that night, and by the time an autopsy was performed, two months had passed and the results were inconclusive. The likely possibility is that she was taking dimethyl sulfoxide as a home remedy, which turned into dimethyl sulfate in her blood when hospital workers defibrillated her. That, or a shadowy conspiracy injected her with alien DNA.
en.m.wikipedia.org...

I would need to see a toxicology on her liver before I could give any in depth analysis of my own. I'm not sure what possessed this poor lady to take dimethyl sulfoxide. Perhaps, a failed attempt at synthesizing dimethyltryptamine? Highly intriguing science experiment, to say the least. What is your synopsis? Alien intervention? Or a chemistry experiment gone gravely wrong?

Maybe a home remedy gone bad....or voodoo medicine gone wrong

a reply to: MikhailBakunin

My vote?

Or a chemistry experiment gone gravely wrong?

Gravely,,,,chuckle chuckle

a reply to: MikhailBakunin

A creepy case indeed.

It reminded me of a book I read about the first world war,some soldiers/medics would remove bodies after gas attacks,and some would suffer the effects of the gas just by moving the bodies-as they would sometimes expel lingering gas from their dead lungs when moved...
Horrific to think about what our forefathers went through back then.

a reply to: MikhailBakunin

When her blood was drawn, it smelled of ammonia and had manila-colored particles floating in it.

Ammonia, huh? Sure that wasn't the janitor?

You don't smell blood when you take it out of someone's arm right into a Vacutainer.

If she had been using DMSO in excess, there's the question of what she used it with; it's a carrier that pulls whatever else is used along with it through the skin and into the blood. She could have been poisoned with anything from hand lotion to shampoos, soap, etc. And yeah, if she was near death from chemical poisoning of any kind, the room could have reeked enough to cause a few people to faint. Dying people often don't smell all that good, as a matter of course.

There was an interesting murder mystery show I saw years ago where a snake venom expert used DMSO to kill someone; they combined DMSO with cobra venom and put it on the victim's car steering wheel. The victim bled to death internally and of course our hero the protagonist figured out the cause of the internal bleeding in 40 minutes flat...

wow that is intense. perhaps she had some protein-folding disorder which led to a bad chemical rxn? Maybe something akin to the suspected internal causes behind spontaneous human combustion. I have no idea though. My fiance is the one with the science know-how

is this a unique case?

if the drug messed up her homeostasis that would really really suck. O.o