On February 19, 1994, the emergency room at Riverside General Hospital looked just like any other California hospital on a Saturday night.
Until Gloria Ramirez arrived.
She was 31. A mother of two. Diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer. But what happened in that ER had nothing to do with her cancer—at least, not in the usual way.
She walked in breathing fast, confused, and speaking in slurred sentences. Her heart was racing. Her chest was rising and falling in a weird rhythm doctors instantly recognized: Cheyne–Stokes respiration. That’s a dangerous sign—something was seriously wrong with her brain or lungs.
Her boyfriend, Johnnie Estrada, had called 911 earlier that night. Gloria had spent the whole day vomiting. By the time paramedics brought her in around 8:15 p.m., her body was crashing.
The ER team jumped into action. They gave her three powerful sedatives—diazepam, midazolam, and lorazepam. Then lidocaine and Bretylium to calm her heart. Nothing was working.
Her condition got worse. They prepped the defibrillator to shock her heart back into rhythm. That’s when things got strange. First, the smell.
As nurses leaned in to treat her, they noticed a garlic-like odor coming from her mouth. Not just a hint—strong enough to turn heads. Then, the sheen. Her body looked like it had been coated in oil. None of the staff had applied anything. And it wasn’t sweat.
Nurse Susan Kane went to draw blood. She noticed an ammonia-like smell coming from the blood tube itself. That wasn’t normal. She handed the sample to a medical resident, Dr. Julie Gorchynski, who looked down and saw something floating in it—yellow-brown particles, like crystals or sand.
Seconds later, Susan Kane felt heat rising in her face. Then everything went black. She fainted. The ER spun into chaos.
Julie Gorchynski, who had just handled the same blood sample, began to feel dizzy. She walked out to the nurses’ station to catch her breath. Before she could even answer a co-worker’s question, she collapsed too.
Next came Maureen Welch, the respiratory therapist. She’d seen plenty of chemo patients, but said this blood didn’t smell like anything she’d ever encountered.
She dropped shortly after. She later woke up and couldn’t control her limbs. The ER was now a danger zone. The call went out to evacuate. Every patient inside the emergency room was rushed outside to the hospital’s parking lot. An internal emergency was declared.
Only a skeleton crew stayed behind to try to stabilize Gloria. They kept working for 45 minutes. At 8:50 p.m., Gloria Ramirez was declared dead. The official cause was kidney failure caused by cancer. But nobody was talking about the cancer. They were talking about the gas.
In total, 23 people who had been near Gloria that night reported symptoms—fainting, muscle spasms, nausea, breathing problems. Five were hospitalized. One of them, Dr. Gorchynski, spent two weeks in intensive care. This wasn’t normal.
The hospital sealed off the ER. Gloria’s body was bagged and placed in an airtight container. She wasn’t treated like a patient. She was treated like a biohazard.
The press gave her a name: The Toxic Lady. It was catchy. But nobody had answers.
The first investigation came from the state. California’s Department of Health and Human Services brought in two scientists: Dr. Ana Maria Osorio and Dr. Kirsten Waller. They interviewed 34 people who were in the ER that night.
Using a detailed questionnaire, they mapped out what everyone saw, smelled, and felt. The results raised eyebrows.
Those who got sick were mostly women. They’d all been close to Gloria—within two feet. Many had touched her, especially her IV lines. But blood tests? Totally normal. No toxins. No contamination.
So the state gave a name to what they thought had happened: mass hysteria. In other words, people panicked. One person fainted, and the fear spread. That was the official story. But not everyone accepted it.
Julie Gorchynski was furious. She hadn’t just fainted. She had breathing issues. Her liver swelled. Her bones started to die in her knees—something called avascular necrosis. She wasn’t scared. She was sick. And she wasn’t alone.
So the Riverside County Coroner’s Office called in the heavyweights. They brought in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—one of the country’s top forensic science centers. And their scientists had a wild theory. They believed Gloria had been self-medicating with a chemical called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO.
It’s a solvent. You can find it in hardware stores, usually sold as a degreaser. But back in the ‘90s, cancer patients were using it on their skin to relieve pain. It’s not approved by the FDA, but it was known in alternative medicine circles.
Here’s what the lab thought happened:
- Gloria used DMSO on her skin to treat pain.
- Her body absorbed large amounts of it.
- Her kidneys were failing, so the chemical stayed in her system longer than it should.
- Paramedics gave her oxygen on the way to the hospital.
- That turned the DMSO into dimethyl sulfone, or DMSO₂.
- DMSO₂ can crystallize at room temperature—just like what they saw in her blood.
- When they defibrillated her, the electric shock may have triggered one more change—into dimethyl sulfate.
And that’s where it gets scary.
Dimethyl sulfate is a real-life chemical weapon. It’s toxic. It can damage the lungs, eyes, and nervous system. It’s known to cause seizures, unconsciousness, and even death in small amounts.
It could explain every single symptom that happened in the ER. One body. One rare chemical chain reaction. Accidental chemical warfare. But there were problems with the theory.
For starters, no one actually found dimethyl sulfate. And while the science sort of made sense, many chemists said the reaction would have taken too long to happen in real life.
The temperatures weren’t high enough. The human body wasn’t the right environment. And even if it did happen, wouldn’t there be some trace of it left behind? That’s when the next twist dropped.
Gloria’s family asked for an independent autopsy. But by the time the body was released—ten weeks later—her remains were in bad shape. Her heart was missing. Some of her organs had been contaminated with feces. The vial of blood taken the night she died? Gone. There was almost nothing left to test.
Dr. Richard Fukumoto, the family’s chosen pathologist, couldn’t even perform a proper exam. The official cause of death was ruled “natural causes” related to cancer. Her family wasn’t buying it.
Gloria was finally buried on April 20, 1994, at Olivewood Memorial Park in Riverside. Her sister, Maggie Ramirez-Garcia, went public. She said Gloria wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t gone to that hospital. She believed the hospital’s poor care—and the bizarre exposure—killed her. And she wasn’t alone.
To this day, experts disagree. Some stand by the DMSO theory. Others still think it was mass hysteria. But there are holes in both stories. Mass hysteria can’t explain real organ damage.
And the DMSO theory? It’s never been proven to happen in a person. It’s still the most “scientific” explanation available—but even that’s a maybe.
Over the years, Gloria’s story has slipped into mystery documentaries and Reddit rabbit holes. A woman walks into a hospital. Everyone around her passes out. She dies. And no one can say why.
No other case in modern medicine has matched it. No one else has turned their own body into a chemical crime scene. But maybe the scariest part isn’t the science. It’s how fast she became a headline, not a human.
The Toxic Lady.
Gloria Ramirez was 31. She was in pain. She was scared. She did what any of us would do—she went to the ER. And somehow, the system failed everyone.
Especially her.
