Diagnosis
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Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast will feature three medical horror stories. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called "Honking Boy." When a doctor rushes to help a boy who's having trouble breathing, what he ends up discovering about this boy is truly absurd. The second story you'll hear is called "Magic Elixir," and it's about a 1900s drink that had very serious consequences. And the third and final story you'll hear is called "Shiny But Deadly," and it's about a healthy man who suddenly became extremely sick, and the doctor's only clue was the man's very unusual side job.

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Deliberate in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

So if that's of interest to you, please spend many years in medical school becoming a surgeon and then get a job as a surgeon at the hospital located closest to where the follow button lives. And then eventually, when the follow button goes in for minor outpatient surgery, volunteer to be their surgeon and just give them a full-blown craniectomy. Okay, let's get into our first story called Honking Boy. Want to know one of my favorite sounds? Here it is.

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On November 2nd, 1848, a German doctor named Karl Heinrich August von Biro was just opening up his private medical practice in East Prussia when a teenage boy burst in through the doors looking totally frantic. Before the doctor could ask any questions, the teenager blurted out that another boy in town needed his help right now. When the doctor asked, you know, "What does the boy need?" the teenager would say, "Well, the boy is honking like a goose."

For a second, Dr. Von Bureau thought this might be a joke, but then he saw the look on the teenager's face and he could tell he was very upset and very serious. So the doctor grabbed his bag and he ran outside with the teenager and they hailed a horse and carriage and they told the driver to hurry up.

When Dr. Von Biro and this teenager arrived at the honking boy's house, the honking boy's mother came running outside looking totally flustered, and she flagged down the doctor and then brought him inside her house. And as she led the doctor through the home towards her son's bedroom, she explained what was going on.

She said her 12-year-old son had been outside playing with his friends when suddenly he had developed this really intense coughing fit, kind of out of nowhere. And then finally when the coughing stopped and the boy tried to breathe in, his throat made this horrible honking sound.

And so her boy had come in the house honking with every breath. And so kind of in a panic, the mother had opened up her son's mouth and looked inside, but she hadn't seen anything. And she knew her son was not sick. There were no other symptoms really at all that were concerning about her son. It was just that he was honking.

Now, for a while, the mother thought this would just kind of clear up, that maybe it was just kind of some byproduct of coughing really, really hard. But now it had been 18 hours and the boy was still honking with nearly every breath, which is why she'd finally told the teen to go get the doctor.

When the mother let Dr. Bonbiro into her son's bedroom and he got a look at the honking boy, he couldn't believe how terrible the boy looked. His face was all swollen and kind of bluish, and he was sweating profusely. And when the doctor watched him try to breathe in, not only did he honk, but also very clearly, this boy was really struggling just to breathe. So it was more than the sound, it looked like he was suffocating.

And so the doctor rushed over to the boy and told him to open up his mouth. The boy did, and the doctor looked into his mouth, but there was nothing he could see that was blocking his airway. And so the doctor just put his finger into this boy's mouth, and he reached down inside, and suddenly he felt something lodged in the boy's throat that was small and hard, and he

And he couldn't quite grab it, so he grabbed his forceps, which are kind of like big tweezers, and he reached back into the boy's mouth, and he tried to grab this object that was clearly obstructing his throat, but the object was too slippery, and the doctor could not pull it out.

And so the doctor is looking at this boy who's obviously struggling to breathe and he's thinking to himself, you know, if I don't get in there and get this obstruction out, this kid is going to die. And so the doctor made a decision right then and there to perform an emergency tracheotomy, which is a surgery where you basically cut a hole in someone's neck in order to create a hole in their throat to let air go in. But in this case, the doctor was just opening up his throat to try to get to this object.

And so the doctor pulled out his scalpel and he performed the tracheotomy on this boy. He opened up his throat and when he looked inside the hole into this boy's throat, he saw the obstruction. It was like this pink small hard object. And so the doctor just reached in, scooped it with his finger and pulled it out.

And right away, the boy could breathe again. He was not honking anymore. It was obvious that this fixed the problem. But the doctor and the mother are just looking at this object in the doctor's hand, having no idea how to react to this because it made no sense. The object that was trapped in this boy's throat that was making him honk like a goose was a literal goose's larynx.

The larynx is a hollow tube in your throat that helps you make sound. In humans we call it the voice box. And right before this boy began honking, he was playing a game with his friends that involved taking recently severed goosenecks and blowing through them like they were trumpets. And at some point as this boy was doing it, he began to cough for some reason. And on the inhale during one of these coughing fits, he had this gooseneck in front of his mouth.

And so when he inhaled suddenly, he inhaled the goose larynx. And so that was why he sounded like a goose. He literally had a goose's voice box in his throat. Luckily, the honking boy would make a full recovery. Our next story is called Magical Excerpt.

In the early 1900s, Edmund Byers was a man who other people envied. He was born into a very wealthy family in New York City. He attended Yale University in Connecticut, which is a very prestigious Ivy League university, and he was devilishly handsome.

After his college graduation, he didn't need a job because his family was so rich, and so instead he focused his time on a passion of his, which was golfing. And in time, he became this world-class golfer, going so far as to win the 1906 U.S. Amateur Tournament, which is the biggest amateur golf tournament in the world that most of the winners go on to become professional golfers.

And so Eben most likely would have followed that path and become a pro golfer had his father not just handed over the very successful metalworking business that he started that made his family wealthy in the first place. And so Eben stopped his golf career and became the chairman of this incredibly successful company. And so overnight, he basically went from being just rich to being uber rich, making more money than he could possibly spend.

But Eben did attempt to spend his money. He pretty much immediately began buying up luxury properties all over the country. He bought horse racing stables in the United Kingdom and in America, and he bought an entire luxury box at Forbes Field, which is where the Pittsburgh Pirates professional baseball team used to play.

And so in addition to owning all these incredible things, Eben also, through his role as chairman of this company, began connecting with and befriending very powerful and influential people like the founders and executives at the Coca-Cola Company. And so all in all, Eben's life was really going quite well until 1927.

That year, Eben was 47 years old and he took some time off from gallivanting around the world and rubbing shoulders with famous people to go catch a football game at his alma mater at Yale University. So he hops on a train, he rides to Connecticut, he watches this game, and then afterwards he gets back on the train to head back to Pittsburgh.

And this is a very long ride. It's over 12 hours long. And so Eben naturally bought a first class ticket. And so he was inside of a train car that had bunk beds for passengers to sleep on during the ride. And so Eben climbed into a top bunk and he fell asleep.

A few hours later, after the train is well on its way to Pittsburgh, Eben, in his sleep, manages to roll to the side of the bed and actually falls out of his bed onto the ground. He lands hard on his left side, it wakes him up, and as he stands up, he thinks he's okay, but then he feels this shooting pain in his left arm. So he's moving his arm around, he's not really sure what's wrong with it, but he's hoping it's just some bruising, and so he decides to get back into his bunk and just go back to sleep.

So he manages to fall asleep despite the pain. And then when they roll into the station in Pittsburgh several hours later, he wakes up and right away he feels that pain in his left arm.

and so after getting off the train and going back to his house and dropping off his luggage he went right to his physical therapist's office to ask him if there was anything he could do to help with the pain in his arm and so the physical therapist examines evan's shoulder and determines that you know there's no structural damage to his arm but obviously evan is in pain and so he says look you know there's a new product that came online that's quite expensive but since you're a man of means maybe it's something you want to consider it's

It's called Radithor, and it's supposed to dull aches and pains, and it's supposed to give you this huge boost of energy. And so, you know, maybe you want to try that. And so Evan was really excited at the notion of taking this new health tonic and said, yeah, let's do it.

And so his physical therapist wrote him a prescription for Rattathor. Eben took the prescription and he went to the drugstore. He picked up a half ounce bottle of this liquid. He went back to his house and as prescribed, he drank a very small spoonful of this liquid. And right away, he felt this surge of energy, the pain in his arm started to fade, all the things this health tonic claimed to be able to do, it was doing.

And so over the next couple of days, Eben very diligently every day took the prescribed amount, a very small spoonful of this ratathor. And every day he felt better and better and better, not just the pain in his arm, but overall he felt happier. He felt fitter. He felt alive. And he was attributing all those feelings to this miracle tonic.

And so he began taking more and more of this tonic, well beyond what was prescribed, to the point where he was drinking three full bottles of Rattathor every single day. And so for years he did this, and it was all going great until his jaw fell off.

Literally, in 1931, one day, his lower jaw just separated from his skull and went slack. And so the reason this happened was because Rattathor was actually just radioactive water.

In the early 1900s, the radioactive element radium was believed to have highly curative properties with no side effects. And so naturally, at the time, dozens of health products were created with radium being their main ingredient. And Radithor was one of those products. It was literally just water and radium.

And so after consuming over 1400 bottles of Rattathor over a three year period, Ebon's body was finally just starting to disintegrate from the inside out.

After he had his jaw surgically removed, along with large portions of his upper jaw, the rest of his body also just began to crumble. And so by the end of 1931, when his story was making headlines all around the world about the dangers of Radithor and really more specifically the dangers of radium,

Eben had become completely bedridden and his skull was now beginning to disintegrate. There were holes forming all over his skull that were exposing portions of his brain. And so by 1932, Eben was dead.

Eben was buried in Pittsburgh, and he was buried inside of a lead-lined coffin that was designed to absorb any of the radiation emitting from his bones. And then 30 years after he was buried, so in 1965, scientists actually exhumed his skeleton to see if it was still emitting radiation. And they determined it was still emitting the same levels of radiation as when he died.

And they actually would ultimately figure out that radium, this radioactive element, has a half-life of 1,600 years. So what that means is Eben's body will remain highly radioactive for centuries. Mr. Ball and Collection is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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If you're listening to this podcast, then chances are good you are a fan of The Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. And if that's the case, then I've got some good news. We just launched a brand new Strange, Dark, and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Baughlin's Medical Mysteries. And as the name suggests, it's a show about medical mysteries, a genre that many fans have been asking us to dive into for years, and we finally decided to take the plunge and the show is awesome.

The next and final story of today's episode is called Shiny But Deadly.

On the evening of July 3rd, 1992, 35-year-old George Decker was cooking in the kitchen inside of the apartment that he shared with his girlfriend in Jasper, Indiana. And as George cooked, he began to cough.

At first, George thought it was just a little tickle in his throat that would go away. But as he continued to cough, this feeling, this sensation in his throat that was making him cough was only getting worse and worse. And this cough was not a normal cough. It was a deep, guttural, kind of rough-sounding cough that really hurt as he did it. And it kind of scared George, like he had never heard himself make this sound before.

And in the other room, George's girlfriend, Juanita, she heard this very odd sounding cough. And so she came out into the kitchen to see what was going on.

And when she got there, she found George leaning on the counter, barely able to catch his breath because he was coughing so much. And this was totally out of character for George. He wasn't sick. He didn't have some sort of respiratory problem. He didn't smoke cigarettes. He did work in a metal shop where he melted down aluminum and poured it into different molds. But he always followed all the safety precautions. He wore a mask. You know, he did all the things you're supposed to do to make sure he didn't inhale anything toxic.

And so there was really no good reason why George would suddenly be having this unbelievable coughing fit. And so as Juanita kept asking George, you know, "Hey, are you okay? Can I do anything?" George, he can't even talk. He just pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and he put it over his mouth as he continued to cough. And then when he pulled the handkerchief away, it was clearly covered in blood.

Now, George was quick to kind of put the handkerchief back in his pocket, not wanting to deal with the fact that he was coughing up blood. But Juanita, she saw the blood and said, okay, George, I don't know what's going on. You are going to the hospital right now. Now, George, even though he couldn't talk because he was coughing so much, clearly did not want to go. And he kind of resisted Juanita pretty aggressively. He did not want to go. But Juanita finally grabbed him and literally dragged him through the house, out the front door and down into their car.

And then just a few moments later, they were on their way to the hospital located a few miles away. By the time they actually parked in front of the emergency room at this hospital, George's cough had actually died down a little bit. And so now George was being really insistent that it was totally pointless to go to the hospital, that they did not need to be here. You know, take me back home. This is ridiculous. But Juanita really pressed him and said, you can't goof around with coughing up blood. You have to go in there.

And so finally, George, who was totally annoyed by this, relented. He got out of the car and the two of them walked to the hospital. And then when they went in the front doors of this emergency room, a nurse came up to greet them and see what was going on. And George kind of inexplicably pushed the nurse like to get away from me. I don't need your help.

And Juanita, she was so embarrassed and tried to apologize, and the staff just kind of rolled with it and just kind of gave him his space. And then for the rest of the time they were there, the staff basically only talked to Juanita, while George sat in the corner with his arms crossed, unwilling to talk or give them any information.

Toward the end of this hospital visit, the doctor would prescribe George some antibiotics for what he called an upper respiratory infection, and then the doctor asked George if he was willing to stay the night so they could observe him and make sure he really was okay. But George flatly refused, he got up, turned around, and practically ran out of the hospital. And Juanita said, I'm so sorry, and she followed after him.

Over the next couple of days, George would take these antibiotics that he was prescribed, but they really did not make a difference. He continued to have these huge coughing fits, and even worse than that, something Juanita noticed was George's skin was clearly turning blue, in particular on his arms, his hands, his fingertips, and on his face.

And so finally, about a week after that first visit to the ER, Juanita, she looked at George and just felt like he looks so bad. He has to go back. They have to check him again. And so Juanita was able to, again, convince George to go to the hospital. He was very resistant to the idea, but now he was so physically weakened and drained from whatever was going on, he just kind of went with whatever Juanita wanted.

And this time, when they went to the hospital, they would give George a chest x-ray and it would reveal George had pneumonia in both of his lungs. This explained why he was coughing so much and it also explained why his skin was turning blue. Because of this infection in his lungs, his body was not getting enough oxygen and when that happens, it leads to a condition known as cyanosis, which turns your skin blue.

But when doctors tried to figure out what was actually causing George's pneumonia, they immediately ran into a brick wall. Usually, pneumonia is caused by bacteria, viruses, or some other microscopic invader, and doctors can test a patient's mucus to determine which one it is. But when they tested George's mucus, they couldn't find any evidence of anything that would cause pneumonia.

The doctors also ruled out aluminum pollution because he did work in a metal plant and could have been inhaling the aluminum when he melted it down, but he was negative for that. And then also doctors began looking into all these crazy other possibilities like strange fungus that maybe George had come in contact with that caused this or, you know, very rare viruses and bacteria. But no matter what the doctors thought of, when they tested George, it would come back negative.

And so, with the exception of his x-ray that clearly showed he had pneumonia, every other test they ran on George made it seem like he was a healthy guy. And so George would spend weeks in the hospital with doctors and nurses constantly trying to figure out what was wrong with him but not succeeding.

And as each day went by, George's condition got worse and worse until finally he was put on a ventilator because his lungs actually just didn't work on their own. And so a ventilator basically forces air into the patient's body. But no matter how much oxygen they pumped into George's body, he continued to have these terrible coughing fits and his skin stayed blue. Finally, in October, so three months after George had first developed this coughing fit, he would pass away.

George's doctors were totally baffled. It did not make sense what had happened to George. He was young and healthy, and then something that was totally powerful and aggressive had wiped him out. And so the doctors knew they needed to figure out what that thing was and how to cure it before other people died from the same mystery illness.

On October 8th, so five days after George passed away, an Indiana pathologist named Dr. Daniel C. Weaver, who was known for his ability to figure out unexplained deaths like George's, was called to the hospital where George died to perform George's autopsy. And when Dr. Weaver began the autopsy and looked inside of George, he could not believe how just absolutely ruined George's lungs were.

Healthy lungs are sort of like cotton candy. The tissue is light and airy, which is perfect for transferring the oxygen we breathe throughout our bodies. But George's lungs were thick and heavy, and they were lumpy with scar tissue. I mean, they were totally useless. And so Dr. Weaver knew, you know, George basically suffocated to death. But now the question was, why?

Dr. Weaver would run into the same obstacles as all the other doctors when he attempted to find contamination inside of George's lungs. There was nothing to see.

In fact, at the end of the autopsy, Dr. Weaver had basically learned nothing as to why this happened to George. In frustration, after this autopsy was over, Dr. Weaver went to George's medical records and just began reading through them, and it was at this point that he saw something very odd that other doctors clearly had seen too, but they must have thought it was not important.

At that very first ER visit, Juanita had told nurses and doctors that George, before he had begun coughing in the kitchen, he had been in a great mood.

And generally speaking, George was just a very positive and upbeat person. But she said once he started coughing, it was like he transformed into somebody else and became mean and nasty. And Juanita had to practically drag him to the hospital. And then also there was a note in the file about how George had walked through the doors and pushed that admissions nurse. And so Dr. Weaver thought to himself, you know, maybe George's belligerence was not just him being a jerk, but

But maybe he had ingested something toxic that was affecting obviously his lungs and also his brain. And that was causing him to behave this way. And so Dr. Weaver called the manager of the metal shop where George had worked to try to ask him if there were other chemicals or toxins inside of the plant that maybe George had been exposed to.

But the manager just did not want to talk about any of that. Instead, he just wanted to talk about basically how awful George was as a person. The manager clearly did not like George.

And he began talking about how George was obsessed with making money at all costs and that in addition to working in the metal plant, George had all these kind of sketchy, kind of borderline illegal side jobs to make more money. And then at some point, the manager just began talking about this one particular potential scam that George was involved in that had to do with little bits of silver and gold and

And the doctor at this point is not really even listening. He just wants to get off the phone with this guy because it's obvious the manager is not really trying to help. He's just trying to bash George. But at some point, the manager, in detailing this gold and silver scam, mentioned something that piqued the doctor's interest. And suddenly the doctor was really intently listening to this manager and actually began taking notes and asking clarifying questions about this particular scam that George was apparently involved in.

And then when Dr. Weaver hung up the phone with this manager, he felt pretty confident that he had actually figured out what had happened to George. The clues had all been there the whole time. George's blue skin and his rude and violent behavior at the ER. But nobody had put them together correctly because the cause of what was happening to George was so weird, no one would have ever thought of it on their own.

On the night that George first began coughing in the kitchen, he was not cooking dinner like everybody assumed. He was actually cooking teeth, like human teeth.

The metal shop manager told Dr. Weaver on the phone about the scam that George was involved in that had to do with little bits of gold and silver. And the manager explained to Dr. Weaver that George was going to all of these local dentist offices and he was collecting all of their discarded teeth. What George wanted was teeth that had fillings in them because some of the fillings, especially for older patients, were made from gold and silver.

George would then literally cook the teeth until he was able to extract the gold and silver. Now, if he had just been cooking teeth with gold fillings, he'd probably still be alive. But because George also was cooking the teeth with silver in them, during that process of cooking the silver teeth, mercury gas was released and George would inhale the gas.

And mercury gas is deadly. And so the gas went into George, it ravaged his lungs, and it also created these massive mood swings and mental disturbances, which explained why he became so nasty and mean when he got to the ER. Also, ingesting high levels of silver, which George was doing as well, can turn your skin blue. So in the end, George did not die from pneumonia. He died from mercury poisoning.

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more bone-chilling content, be sure to check out all of our studios' podcasts, not just this one, but also Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, Wartime Stories, and Run Full. Just search for Ballin Studios on any podcast platform and you'll find all of them. If you want to watch hundreds more strange, dark, and mysterious stories, just head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin.

So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.

In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List. A cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses and specific instructions for people's murders.

This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.