10: Fatal Dose: Three Tales of Radiation Poisoning
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Humans have tinkered with radiation since the late 1800s. And though we've made scientific breakthroughs with it, think cancer treatments and x-rays, those achievements have not come without some deadly consequences. See, radiation is one of the most lethal forms of energy on the planet. Yet, throughout recent history, we haven't been able to keep our hands off of it.

Today, we're going to dive into three real-life, terrifying stories surrounding radioactivity. Our first tale is about a young boy in Mexico who found a stray radiation capsule. Our second is about a man who thought radiation would cure all of his ailments. And our last one is the terrifying story of the man who absorbed the highest amount of radiation ever recorded. And as always, listener discretion is advised.

It's that feeling. When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I'm your host, Kaylin Moore.

If you're a new listener, welcome. And if you've been enjoying this podcast for some time, make sure you follow us on Instagram at HeartStartsPounding and rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. You can also support the podcast on Patreon, which is linked in the show description. We release episodes every Thursday, though we are taking April off to release a scripted fiction horror podcast called The Timekeeper. We'll be back on a weekly schedule in May. ♪

In January, a capsule the size of a coin fell off the back of a truck on a long stretch of highway in Australia. And this sent the entire country into a panic. The capsule contained casein-137, radiation used in cancer treatments that was potentially deadly in its capsule form.

The missing capsule wasn't just an immediate threat, it could kill anyone who found it over the next 300 years. That's some powerful stuff. So this begs the question, what would happen to you if you were the one that found that capsule? Picture this. You're out for a walk near your home when something on the ground catches your eye. It's shiny and metallic and about the size of a tic-tac.

For a moment, you're amazed you even saw it. You pick it up, you don't want a dog swallowing it, and you put it in your jacket pocket, but it's so small, you forget it's even there. You finish your walk, come home and take your jacket off, but now, every time you put your jacket on, you carry that little metallic tic-tac with you. Something strange starts happening between a few days and a few weeks later. It starts with nausea.

At first you think it's something you ate, but it's persistent and gets worse over the next few days. Then come the headaches. First mild, but then pulsing and intense. The headaches are accompanied by dizziness. Days pass, then weeks, and you just keep feeling worse. Oh, and the skin by your jacket pocket is starting to burn.

You take a look and a deep purple-red is starting to bloom on your side. Eventually you go to the doctor, but they can't find anything wrong with you. Maybe it's the flu, they suggest. But you know it's not the flu. No. This feels like your whole body is starting to fall apart. That little innocuous tic-tac you found in the grass was a radiation capsule.

And it was silently destroying your body from the inside out. It was killing your white blood cells, melting the skin around it, and making a home for itself in the marrow of your bones. Eventually, it will kill you.

It sounds far-fetched, but it's happened before. And it almost happened again just last month in Australia. To kick us off, we're going to hear a story that's essentially the worst case scenario of what would happen if someone found that radiation capsule. This is the story of the Mexican radiation accident. In March of 1962, a family of four moved into a house in Mexico City.

The family included a mother and father, a 10-year-old boy, and a 3-year-old girl. One day, soon after the family had moved into the house, the 10-year-old son was out playing in the yard when he noticed something small and shiny in the grass. Thinking nothing of it, he picked it up and he put it in his left pant pocket, and then he ran inside.

He didn't tell anyone in the family he had found this capsule. He probably didn't even think about it again after he grabbed it. And so he left it in his pocket for the next few days. What he didn't know was that that was a capsule of cobalt-60, a form of radiation used to treat cancer and sterilize medical equipment. In its current capsule form, it was incredibly dangerous.

On April 1st, the boy's mother found the capsule in his pocket and removed it. She didn't know exactly what to do with this capsule because to her it just looked like a small piece of scrap metal, perfectly cylindrical and smooth, so she put it in a cabinet full of glasses next to the oven in the kitchen. Over the next week though, the boy started feeling ill and his mother noticed that he had burns on his abdomen and left thigh.

What could he have been doing that would have him burned like that? She brought him to the doctor, but the doctor didn't think it was anything serious. The family brushed it off and figured that he was young, he would probably just heal on his own. But radiation isn't like, say, carbon monoxide poisoning, where you can crack a window and just feel better. No, once you've been exposed to that high of a level, a respite from the radiation can't save you.

Even though the tablet was no longer in his pant pocket, a lot of the damage had been done. So on April 17th, the boy's grandmother came to live with the family and she noticed that something was wrong in the house. For one, the glasses inside the cabinet where the capsule was had started to turn black and the fingernails of everyone in the family had turned black as well.

The boy was also worse for wear, and now the burns on his leg and abdomen were pretty infected. Unbeknownst to the family, the radiation had not only burned deep into the boy's skin, but also had damaged his bone marrow to the point where he would be completely unable to fight off the infection. Less than two weeks later, on April 29th, the boy died from this infection. And at the time of his death,

The fact that it was caused by the radiation was completely unknown to everyone, including the coroner. That was hardly the end of the nightmare for the family, however. The capsule was still in the cabinet and every day it was emitting lethal doses of radiation throughout the house.

The mother, who was also unfortunately pregnant at the time, became ill in July. The report said that she had extensive hemorrhaging and depression of blood cell forming tissue, which basically means that she would also be unable to fight off infection. She succumbed to her illness on July 19th. But this time, the doctors autopsied her and noticed that she had signs of radiation poisoning. That was strange, the doctors thought.

She didn't work at a power plant and she wasn't undergoing cancer treatment, so how would she have been exposed to so much radiation that it would kill her? Instead of investigating further, the doctors just figured her death was not caused by radiation and that maybe they had made a mistake. But get this, and this is the part of the story that trips me up. On July 22nd,

a stranger showed up to the house claiming to be the owner of the radiation capsule and took it away.

In all of my research, I could not figure out who this person was, nor why there was only one capsule of theirs missing, and why the hell it was in the family's backyard. So now, the capsule is gone, but that couldn't stop the damage that had already been done to the rest of the family. The three-year-old daughter, whose symptoms first started in May with a small rash, succumbed to a respiratory infection and severe anemia on August 18th.

At this point, the physicians of Clinic 19 at the Mexican Institute of Social Security firmly believed that the cause of the damage done to the family was radiation poisoning. The fact that three people had all died from infections and showed signs of anemia and white blood cell depletion pretty much cemented it. The father and grandmother were then immediately transported to the National Medical Center for strict observation and bone marrow treatment.

Despite the treatment, the grandmother died on October 15th, but the father survived. It's believed that because he went to work every day and was away from the house, he may have been able to avoid the worst of the radiation poisoning. The bodies of his family were all tested for their radiation levels, and the son had about four times as much radiation exposure as the father. And like I said, to this day,

It's not known why the capsule was laying stray in a field, nor who the stranger claiming to own it was.

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Voidware prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. The next story is a tragic tale of a man who was told that drinking radioactive water would be a miracle cure for his ailments. Yeah, because he'll be dead. You can't be sick if you're dead. That's a really good point. My sibling Leo is going to help me with this one.

In the 60s, they knew the damage that radiation could do. But just 35 years earlier, when this story takes place, a lot of that was still unknown. This is the story of Eben Byers. So before I dive in, let me give you some context.

Between 1918 and 1928, the Bailey Radium Laboratory sold a radium drink that they called "Radithor," which was said to cure over 150 endocrinologic diseases, including lethargy and sexual impotence. So, as you can imagine, it sold like crazy.

It's projected that 400,000 bottles were sold in just five years. It was a miracle cure after all. So of course everyone wanted some. Was there...was there radium in the original for loco? Is that why they made it illegal? Little was known at the time about what radiation did, but people knew it was energy and so it was marketed as such.

A bottle of Radithor went for $1, which was an astounding price at the time.

and patients were instructed to take it for "as long as you want to feel healthy." I don't think medicine back then was real. It absolutely was not. So that's how businessman Eben Byers was told to consume the drink by his doctor. Eben was an accomplished golfer and the chairman of the Girard Ironworks. He was handsome, his friends described him as a ladies' man, and he had an Ivy League education.

I mean, I'll say it: Eben was a catch. But Eben knew he was a catch, which is the worst kind of catch if you ask me.

and so he lived the Playboy lifestyle. He was actually on a train coming back from a Yale-Harvard football game, and he had splurged and got himself a first-class ticket where you got a bunk bed. He was asleep on the top bunk when all of a sudden the train lurched, causing him to fall out of his bunk bed. He landed on his arm and afterwards, Eben complained of a constant radiating pain all down the injured arm.

At this point, Eben was only 47 years old and he was not about to let an injured arm stop his party lifestyle. So a doctor by the name of C.C. Moyer suggested that he start drinking Radithor, which was then marketed as "sunshine in a bottle." Within days of drinking Radithor, Eben started feeling better. His arm stopped hurting him and based on the fact that at this point in his life he was described as being even more of a ladies man,

Historians believe that the radium was enhancing his libido as well. Eben started feeling so good that he began taking much more Radithor than his doctor prescribed. He went from taking small spoonfuls of Radithor daily to drinking three whole bottles of the stuff.

$3 a day was worth being able to maintain his lifestyle, he thought. But let's take a look at what Raider Thor actually was. Like, what do you think Raider Thor was? So you know when batteries explode and it's like that white foam? I think it's they scrape that white foam off into water and just kind of mix it up and spit in it and then go, all right, that's good enough for me. You're actually not far off.

So, Radithor was listed as "triple distilled water containing a microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228." Its marketing made it seem like a health tonic, but Radithor was most likely radioactive waste produced by coal mining and milling ore.

not necessarily screaming "health tonic." William Bailey, the owner of Bailey Radium Laboratory, was known as a snake oil salesman, with his hands in multiple other dubious wellness businesses. These included another radioactive impotence cure and compressed seaweed tablets that promised to cure at least 32 different diseases. Eben continued pounding Radithor for the next couple years,

Until his health took a dark turn. One day, when Eben was still on his diet of three bottles a day, his jaw separated from his skull. That's correct. Eben's jaw went totally slack, and x-rays showed that the bones connecting his jaw and skull had shattered. The only remedy doctors had at the time was to completely remove his jaw from his face.

There are photos of this online, though I must recommend the most discretion when Googling this. I'm going to show you a photo and you tell me what you see. I'm so scared. Okay, trigger warning. That's just what he looked like? Yeah, after they took his jaw off. Describe what you see. That's not just his jaw. That's like the front of his throat. Newsflash, your jaw is pretty big. And so you can see where like the back of his teeth are.

So that is, yeah, I mean your jaw is what connects like your mouth to your throat. So yeah, when you take all that away, it is gonna look like the front of your throat is gone. The jaw quickly became the least of his problems.

In 1932, Eben died.

He needed to be buried in a lead coffin to contain the radiation, which would continue to strongly secrete from his body for the next 1600 years. After his death, there was an investigation launched into William Bailey, the man who made Radithor.

Not only was Eben dead, but now everyone who had ever drank the substance feared for their lives. Both William and the doctor who prescribed Eben the Radithor came forward and claimed that they had drank more Radithor than Eben and continued to be strong, healthy men. Other drinkers should not worry and should continue drinking as directed. Maybe that was the case, though it's extremely unlikely that anyone ever drank as much Radithor as Eben.

What's more likely is that Eben's doctor was making a 17% kickback on every bottle of Radithor he prescribed to his patients. Eben and many other people desperate for relief from various ailments had trusted these doctors with their pain, and they were used as pawns in a get-rich-quick medical scheme. We may have learned our lesson with radiation, but this tale of medical scheming is as old as time.

Our final tale is of the man who received the highest amount of radiation exposure ever recorded. So let's fast forward to a time where we've been experimenting with radiation for over a century and have a pretty good understanding of its risks.

In 1999, three men, Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara, and Yutaka Yokokawa, were working at a fuel production plant in Japan. Part of their job at this plant was to pour a radioactive liquid that was rich in uranium into a storage vat. It sounds easy enough, but they were dealing with a highly combustible material, and these three men were not set up to succeed.

For one, the plant hadn't been there longer than just a few months, and two of the men, Owuchi and Shinohara, had just started working there. They hadn't worked with this specific uranium-rich substance that they were handling, and their supervisor, Yokokawa, hadn't worked with it in years. But Yokokawa didn't have any time to think about that.

See, the plant was trying desperately to cut costs anywhere they could. This meant that Yokokawa had to pressure the men to perform their job fast. He had a bit more experience than these two men, but that wouldn't matter if he lost his job. So he was following orders when he encouraged his employees to cut safety corners. So, typically, they would pour the radioactive liquid into a small storage tank.

That liquid in that tank would then be poured into a larger precipitation tank. So the larger precipitation tank would typically be a little bit empty because they were pouring liquid from a smaller vessel into it. But to save time, the men were instructed to dump the radioactive liquid directly into the larger tank, meaning that they were at a high risk of pouring way too much in because they weren't measuring.

And since none of them had recently worked with the substance and hadn't received adequate training, they were unaware of what would happen if too much liquid entered the vat too quickly. At 10:35 a.m. that morning, the men poured seven times the authorized amount of liquid into the precipitation tank. And if you're wondering how long it took them to realize they had messed up, the answer is damn near immediately.

There was a loud explosion and then a flash of blue, which is what happens when radiation travels faster than the speed of light.

Before they even knew what had happened, the loud drone of the emergency alarm started ringing, signifying to everyone to get out now. The three men survived the initial blast, but Owuchi had received 17 sieverts of radiation, Shinohara had received 10 sieverts, and Yokokawa, who was sitting behind a desk when it happened, received three. For reference, anything over 10 sieverts is considered lethal.

The men were rushed to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, but because there weren't any protocols in place at the plant for events like this, all of the emergency responders that entered the plant were exposed to the high levels of radiation. The three men arrived at the hospital, but Owuchi was in the worst shape of anyone, and the doctors needed to act fast if he was going to have a fighting chance. So what does this level of radiation do to a person? For one,

He had almost zero white blood cells, meaning that he had no protection from infection. Because of this, Owuchi was actually moved into a sterile room within the hospital. His body was also covered in third-degree burns and his skin had become porous, meaning that staff had to work hard to keep his insides from coming out through his skin. On a micro scale, Owuchi's chromosomes had been obliterated and his DNA was actually destroyed.

This made survival nearly impossible for him because the skin grafts that doctors wanted to do to heal his burns couldn't take because his DNA couldn't rebuild itself. And as devastating as all of this is, the most devastating part was that multiple people wanted Owuchi to stay alive, though death was certain and he was in incredible pain. Doctors wanted to try new stem cell procedures on him and his family wasn't ready to give up.

Perhaps they weren't fully informed as to what was happening to Owuchi and thought he had a fighting chance. But because of their insistence, doctors kept Owuchi alive even though they knew the pain he was in. All in all, Owuchi was kept alive for 83 days, though he begged doctors to let him die.

And he had three heart attacks in one day on the 59th day and was resuscitated every time. But it wasn't until his heart attack on day 83 that they finally couldn't bring him back. Shinohara also passed away after seven months, but Yokokawa survived. He faced criminal charges for negligence and the plant they worked at was sued for 121 million Japanese yen. ♪

After a brief search, the capsule was found in Australia, preventing a disaster like what we've talked about today. All three of these disasters were preventable, but the last one feels particularly tragic. I've also worked at jobs where I questioned the safety of what was happening, but was assured by higher-ups that it was fine. That's how I almost died in a McDonald's freezer that my boss also had almost died in.

Radiation is just further proof that when you put process against people, the process will always win. So the next time you're outside and a shiny, small object catches your eye, maybe think twice before picking it up. This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore.

Have a heart-pounding story you'd like to share on the podcast? Email heartstartspounding at gmail.com. Be sure to rate and review, follow us on Instagram, and support the podcast on Patreon, should you so choose. Until next time. Ooooooh.

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