Analysis of a Toxic Death

About 8:15 in the evening on February 19, 1994, paramedics wheeled a young woman into the emergency room of General Hospital in the southern California city of Riverside. They shot through two sets of double glass doors, veered to their left, and parked her in a small curtained space marked trauma room one. The woman, clad in shorts and a T-shirt, was awake, but she responded to questions with only brief and sometimes incoherent utterances. She was taking shallow, rapid breaths. Her heart was beating too rapidly to allow its chambers to fill before they pumped, so her blood pressure was plummeting. The only thing unusual about her was her age, recalls Maureen Welch, a respiratory therapist who was assisting in the trauma room that night. Most patients who show up in an emergency room with such symptoms are elderly people, Welch says. This woman, the paramedics reported, was 31 ...