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SPEAKER_19: Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_06: Hello, it's Lulu. You know that expression, inside every person there are two wolves fighting.
SPEAKER_07: One of them feeds on darkness and despair and the other one feeds on light and hope
SPEAKER_06: and the one that will win is the one you feed more. What I love about this next story, which is a rerun, is that the reporter in this has two wolves inside her. One is a very worrying mother and the other one is a very curious reporter and she feeds both of them. She just feeds them both and what results is this lovely story that takes you through a trap door in American society to a secret room where a bunch of MacGyvery smart people are holding things together for anyone who happens to call them. That's all I'm going to say. Again, this is an older episode, a rerun. I think it was about seven years ago. So sit back, relax, and let's go. Wait, you're listening.
SPEAKER_04: Okay. All right. Okay.
SPEAKER_10: All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. Rewind. Hello.
SPEAKER_12: Hello. Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell.
SPEAKER_06: Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell.
SPEAKER_17: Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell.
SPEAKER_09: Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell. Jenna Farrell. How are you? How are you? Oh my God. Great. What? I feel like I'm literally talking to another world. I'm Jan.
SPEAKER_02: I'm Robert. This is Radio Lab. And today we are reconnecting with an old producer of ours, Brenna Farrell.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Past life.
SPEAKER_04: Who, since leaving Radio Lab, she's been busy with work. But also- Raising two kids is crazy hard.
SPEAKER_09: With family. Just trying to like take my vitamins and like exist on a low grade panic attack all day.
SPEAKER_04: Well, I guess we should start by let's just try to recall like what it was that's, I don't even know how you bumped in. Like you don't normally- Okay.
SPEAKER_09: So back in 2015, my husband Nick and I were in our tiny apartment back in Brooklyn and we were new parents. Our son Marty was 18 months old at the time. And one morning, I think it was about 5 a.m., like still dark, Marty woke up and he was just, you know, crying, crying, crying. And so I tapped my husband. And it was his turn to get up early and go get Marty. So he got out of bed. I fell right back to sleep. And the next thing I knew, I was like felt somebody tapping me and I sort of rolled over in my bed and there was just this little person looking up at me covered in this greasy stuff. All over his face was shiny. And he was laughing and he held up in his hand this giant jar of diaper ointment. This special medicated stuff that we had bought just that last week. And I just thought, oh my God, he just ate all this medicine and I have no idea how much he ate. And I look around and my husband, who had gotten up with him, changed his diaper and they put him down on the floor to play, had, because he was exhausted, fallen asleep in the chair while watching him. So I just flung myself to the end of the bed and I grabbed Marty in one arm and started frantically searching the label.
SPEAKER_02: Which was filled with words like petrolatum, sericin, panthenol, glycerin, bizibolol. But Brenna says she didn't register any of those words because right underneath that list of ingredients. I just saw this bold type that said, if swallowed, call your doctor or poison control center immediately.
SPEAKER_04: And so I'm clutching my son and I'm clutching this jar and then I yelled to my husband to
SPEAKER_09: wake him up and I'm like, I need you to find the number and call poison control while I hold Marty. And so Nick snaps into action, leaps off the chair into the other room so he can make the
SPEAKER_02: call. And Brenna is left sitting there in the bed holding her 18 month old son who is about to, what, throw up, pass out, die? She's not sure.
SPEAKER_09: Like, have you ever felt that hollow feeling where like your whole chest just drops and you just, it's like, it feels like missing a step. Just utterly sick and then just like all sweaty up in my temple. So I'm sitting on the edge of our bed, Marty's in my lap and I'm eagle eye watching for like whatever's about to start happening to him. And I had always heard that like you have your mother's instinct or whatever that is and like moms know best and moms can tell when something's wrong with their kid. And like sometimes maybe that's true. But for me, Brenna says she just froze.
SPEAKER_09: I was imagining like this huge like glop of ointment has worked its way down your esophagus and now what is it doing to your stomach lining and what's going to happen when it like I was just like I can't take it back. Like what do I do? So Nick has gone to the next room and I hear that he's on the phone with someone and then just moments later he came back out and he said, well, that was the most pleasant phone call I've had in ages. There he was completely calm kind of like smiling at me in the doorway and I'm just still hunched over the bed like hanging on to Marty thinking what is going on? So Nick straightened up and then went into like, oh, okay, here's what happened. I called, they immediately picked up.
SPEAKER_02: Brenna says Nick told her he talked to this man. The guy asked him, super matter of fact, how much Marty weighed. Nick told him 20 pounds or whatever. He asked then what brand of diaper ointment did Marty eat. Nick told him the brand. And then the guy did a little mental math and said, your child's going to be fine.
SPEAKER_09: Totally fine. This was probably not a big deal at all. It was really common.
SPEAKER_04: No vomiting, no nothing?
SPEAKER_09: Nope. He was like just like a slippery little piglet at that point. So I cleaned him up and then, you know, let him play. But for the rest of the day, I just kept thinking, what the hell is poison control? I honestly didn't think we still lived in a world where you could just call a hotline, like get on the telephone and talk to a live human who somehow knows everything about this one specific brand of diaper ointment. And then bam, like 45 seconds later, this full blown crisis in my mind was just gone. And then, you know, I just was having this weird moment of like, there's this invisible network out there that was just kind of primed and waiting to help. Who are these people? So a few months later, I'm totally obsessed with poison control. Check, check, check. And I ended up in a skyscraper in downtown Chicago, up 19 floors down these four twisty turny quarters to the oldest poison control center in America. We're here. When I got there, Carol, the senior director, took me on a tour. It's a lot smaller than I would have expected. No, it's not a dome, but it definitely is an office. I think I was expecting like just banks of like high tech gleaming computers. And instead, that phone hasn't worked in at least five years, but it's still there. It was this narrow office with gray carpet. They have a crusty mushroom poster up there. Great cubicles. I don't know whose cubs hat that is, but it's been here for a while. The place kind of reminded me of like a basement college computer lab, you know, like where all the machines are kind of still running Windows 95 or something like that. And sitting in front of those computers were the poison specialists.
SPEAKER_05: I'm the snakebite person. I love handling snakebite calls. There's Erin, who's into snakes. Like the little old lady who's like working in her backyard. There was a snake and she chops off his head with a shovel and then she brings a snake head into the ER to show them what bit her. And there's Connie. I'm sort of the go to person for mushrooms, how I look at it.
SPEAKER_09: She takes mushroom calls even when she's on vacation. Is that true? Yes.
SPEAKER_10: And she gets excited about it.
SPEAKER_09: There's Cindy, who used to work in the ER. I'm a nurse by background.
SPEAKER_23: There's Jessica. Yeah, I take the home calls.
SPEAKER_01: There's Art. I'm interested in all of it. It's all fun.
SPEAKER_09: And then there's Tony. Hello. Hi Tony. How's it going? Good to meet you. He's the expert in everything. Illinois Poison Center.
SPEAKER_22: I'm ringing.
SPEAKER_23: Okay. Illinois Poison Center.
SPEAKER_09: And while I was there, the stream of calls, it was just nonstop. As soon as one of them would hang up the phone, Illinois Poison Center. Another call would come in.
SPEAKER_23: Okay. Normally healthy. Okay. Gently wipe off his lips with a little warm water on a washcloth. Give him something to drink.
SPEAKER_09: They all told me that in order to work here, you need a background in medicine, special training in toxicology on top of that. It helps to have a good memory, good math skills. But you know, more importantly, what you really need is to be able to stay calm. Calm. Calm.
SPEAKER_22: I usually tell people they're going to be overwhelmed by the first three months. Poison Center.
SPEAKER_09: Because sometimes the calls, you know, glow stick is not going to be a problem.
SPEAKER_23: They're adorable. Oh gosh.
SPEAKER_09: But other times, oh boy, they're like this.
SPEAKER_13: He has a temperature of 104.
SPEAKER_09: This is an ER call. What was the sugar again? A hospital was calling about a male patient who had been found unconscious.
SPEAKER_13: Completely sweaty diaphoretic at home. So the medics are assessing him. His blood sugar was 40. His Tylenol is 372. His pupils, she said, are bouncing all over the place. I don't know what that means.
SPEAKER_09: After she hung up, I asked Cindy if this was a self-harm call. It's believed to be, yes.
SPEAKER_13: She was saying that his wife just died of cancer. Yeah. Is that somewhat rare to get one that serious?
SPEAKER_09: No, not at all.
SPEAKER_13: We get them all the time, at least, you know. Poison Center. Can you spell that? Can you spell the name of that drug? And how many milligrams did you say?
SPEAKER_09: I ended up spending about 12 hours there that day. And if you sit in a Poison Control Center that long, you just...
SPEAKER_01: Poison Center.
SPEAKER_09: These calls are washing over you. They're just coming and coming and coming. Poison Center. You start to feel just kind of... How's your child doing? Overwhelmed by the fact that every single time the phone rings... How many times did she vomit? There's somebody on the other side of the line, and they're in a moment of uncertainty or panic. When did she take the Tylenol overdose? Crisis. This could be pretty serious. And the scale of that is just kind of shocking. We manage 80,000 calls a year out of this room. And that's just this one center. That's just Chicago. If you take the Poison Centers all across the country, they handle almost 3 million cases a year. So you get a call like mine, or much worse, about every 14 seconds or so.
SPEAKER_08: Woah. You know, this is a very poisonous planet.
SPEAKER_09: And thinking about just how many of us are bumping into these things that we think might be poisoning us... Arsenic, mercury...
SPEAKER_08: ...that are poisoning us... Gold is poisonous to some extent. Silver, not so poisonous, but it'll turn you blue. I decided to call up Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at
SPEAKER_09: MIT and poison enthusiast.
SPEAKER_08: I love poison. It's true. Even wrote a book called The Poisoner's Handbook. My husband worries about that a lot. In fact, he has not let me pour him a cup of coffee for the last six years since my book came out. Are you serious? He really was. No, seriously. He's always like, oh, I'll get it.
SPEAKER_09: So Deborah says it helps to kind of think of poison control as part of this much larger back and forth, kind of a dance, an evolving dance that we've been doing with our poisonous planet for thousands of years.
SPEAKER_08: We've been dancing with them in different ways for a very long time. If you go back and look at the hieroglyphics in Egypt, there's actually references to death by peach. And that refers to cyanide poisoning because cyanides are the primary poison in the pits of peaches. Death by peach is actually written in a wall of a temple somewhere or a tomb?
SPEAKER_04: That's exactly right.
SPEAKER_09: And Deborah says, if you go back to the beginning of that dance, you'll find that like with so many things, it starts with murder because we humans first got really interested in poisons when we realized we could use them to kill each other.
SPEAKER_08: And one of my favorite examples is actually arsenic, which in early 19th century Europe
SPEAKER_09: was by all accounts the perfect homicidal poison.
SPEAKER_08: It was tasteless. It was odorless. You could put it into vanilla pudding or oatmeal. It mimicked a natural illness. Gee, it kind of looked like they had a bad gastroenteritis. And at the time, we had no way of detecting it. Literally, when we come into the 19th century, science has not figured out a way to detect a single poison in a corpse.
SPEAKER_04: Well, so what ruined this perfect murder?
SPEAKER_08: Well, there was a chemist in Britain named James Marsh who worked out this incredibly – I mean, by standards today, primitive test, which involved mincing up the tissue from the dead person and adding some acid and heating it up and distilling it. And then as this vapor comes out, it cools onto glass. And if there was any arsenic in the original tissue, that arsenic forms tiny dark crystals and you got a sort of blackish silver mirror forming over the glass. And that was actually the first great test in forensic toxicology, the Marsh test.
SPEAKER_09: This is sort of the moment, Deborah says, that modern science joins our dance with poison.
SPEAKER_08: Because as you see the rise of industrial chemistry and our ability to synthesize cyanide and strychnine and some of these amazingly toxic elements, you also see people's realization of how useful they are. Man, people are so cool around here.
SPEAKER_03: Are we in Soho? We're in West Soho.
SPEAKER_24: West Soho.
SPEAKER_09: What started happening was, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were all these new cleaning products hitting the market designed to kill germs and pharmaceutical products designed to kill headaches or whatever. And suddenly, all these poisons that used to just be out there in nature were in our homes.
SPEAKER_04: Or in the drugstore aisle, for example.
SPEAKER_03: Do you see his fun sunglasses?
SPEAKER_04: Here are our producers Annie McEwen and Matt Kielty taking a jaunt.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, here we are at Hudson Pharmacy.
SPEAKER_04: On our time on Tuesday afternoon, this is during working hours. And they only got the weird Dorito flavors.
SPEAKER_04: Come on. To the local drugstore.
SPEAKER_10: The drugstore. And the cleaning aisle. Wow. So, Drano. It's the bottom of the shelf. Easy for kids to reach. Now let's read the ingredients.
SPEAKER_03: Contains sodium hypochlorite, sodium hydroxide, and sodium silicate. Okay, let me see one second.
SPEAKER_10: Quick check online. Sodium hydroxide. According to Wikipedia, it's used to digest tissues. Say there's like roadkill in a landfill. They will put the roadkill in a sealed container with sodium hydroxide and water. Oh my, it's like Breaking Bad.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and the body turns into a liquid with coffee-like appearance, apparently. It's like it makes people into coffee. It turns people into coffee. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_03: Little higher on the shelf. Everybody's favorite childhood cartoon? Mr. Clean, Meadows and Rain scent.
SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah. Same thing. Sodium hydroxide. Coffee people. Wait, don't open it. Don't open it. It's not, you have to open it, you have to buy it. No. Yes. Look, so. What's this thing? This opens. No, Matt. There's Windex. Windex. Oh, this one is just called ammonia. If you mix ammonia and bleach, what happens?
SPEAKER_10: A poisonous gas results. Also occurs naturally in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. That's impressive. Next one. This little gray bottle up on the highest shelf.
SPEAKER_03: Godalt's Brass and Copper Polish. A brass and copper polish.
SPEAKER_03: Contains 2-butoxyethanol.
SPEAKER_10: It has a sweet, ether-like odor. Here, I'm gonna pop this. Did you just open it and smell it?
SPEAKER_03: Oh, it said harmful if any. Oh, Matt.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, well, it says it can cause adrenal tumors in animals. It's carcinogenic in rodents. Jesus Christ. I hope I didn't smell too much of it.
SPEAKER_03: Matt. Let's just get out of here.
SPEAKER_10: You don't want to get some chips? All right.
SPEAKER_08: We're very comfortable with the fact that we walk down the grocery store aisle or open up the medicine chest and we're surrounded by these different, you know, in pill form or liquid form or spray form or whatever, but these different compounds that actually are dangerous. We're used to that. We live with that, right? Wow.
SPEAKER_09: Snakes. Which brings us to a guy. Let's see. Oh, and there's a plaque for Louis Godalman. Actually, I saw this plaque dedicated to him on the wall at the Poison Center in Chicago. An appreciation of the initiative and devoted service of Louis Godalman, our Ph. Founder of the Poison and Drug Information Center. Anyway, a guy named Louis Godalman.
SPEAKER_11: Louis Godalman, who is a brilliant scientist in the state of Illinois.
SPEAKER_09: Louis passed away back in 1995, but his wife, Catherine, is still very much alive. Absolutely. She's 98 now, but she met Louis back when she was a 20-year-old nurse working in the St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago.
SPEAKER_11: It was 1940, and he was a pharmacist in the hospital, and everybody knew Lou, and we all loved him, and I was the lucky one. I caught him.
SPEAKER_09: Louis was sort of a shorter man. Dark hair, big dark eyebrows.
SPEAKER_11: And he had a great personality, and he would take care of everything that came along.
SPEAKER_09: Friendly, but when it came to his work, he took it very seriously.
SPEAKER_11: The pharmacy was directly across the hall from the emergency room.
SPEAKER_09: So what started happening is Godalman noticed this trend. Like, just to back up, this is the 1940s, and doctors are totally winning against infectious diseases. And what that meant was that, as far as the public was concerned, keeping your family healthy and germ-free is a big deal. And that meant keeping your home super duper clean.
SPEAKER_09: And at the same time, there's just this explosion of new cleaning products coming into the market.
SPEAKER_09: So our kitchen cabinets and cupboards under the bathroom sink just getting filled up with all of these things, like strong smelling powders and liquids, brightly colored bottles and boxes.
SPEAKER_00: All cleaning cleaners, Mr. Clean is now the most powerful ever put into a bottle.
SPEAKER_09: And getting back to Louis, what he began to notice was that more and more, these doctors were coming across the hall to his pharmacy, like first one and then more and more. And you know, they're saying, like, hey, we've got this kid over in the ER. He just got into this new cleaning stuff, and we have no idea what's in it. So the interns and residents in the emergency room would naturally come across the hall
SPEAKER_11: to see Lou. And Lou helped them find out what the child had taken. For example, if the child had swallowed Ajax, that meant he'd actually eaten sodium carbonate
SPEAKER_09: and sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate, which could mean nausea, diarrhea or vomiting.
SPEAKER_11: And Lou used to keep cards on every patient that he saw.
SPEAKER_09: So with each new product that was brought into the emergency room, Lou would write up a new card, white sail bleach, sodium hypochlorite, chest pain, vomiting, safety. Lou decided this was a thing that was very needed.
SPEAKER_09: Because by the 1950s, there were over 250,000 different trade name substances on the market. And so doctors, they just couldn't keep up. And so Lou's stack of cards, it grew taller and taller and taller. And pretty soon word got out. Folks across the country would hear that there's this guy in Chicago who gives out help on poisoning cases. And so many calls were coming in at all hours of the day and night. Eventually Godalman just started telling the switchboard operators they could go ahead and transfer the call to his home.
SPEAKER_11: We would get calls from all the different little emergency rooms and the hospitals in the state.
SPEAKER_04: And what was it like, once you're doing this, then it seems to me that you don't really have normal hours because emergencies will take place whenever they take place. So how did, what was he going to be on call 24 hours a day? Yes. Really?
SPEAKER_11: Yes. Yes, he was. We would get calls in the middle of the night or even during dinner time.
SPEAKER_04: So what happens if, you know, he's in the tub and you're cooking dinner and the phone rings?
SPEAKER_11: I would take the phone to him in the tub. And that's the way it started.
SPEAKER_09: And eventually, Lou's little operation became the first poison control center in the United States in 1953 in Chicago.
SPEAKER_16: 1-800-222-2222. 1-800-222-2222. If you think it might be poison, then the first thing you should do is call 1-800-222-2222.
SPEAKER_15: Poison is the kind of thing you're not supposed to touch. No prescriptions, cleaning stuff or spider bites and such. If you swallowed something bad or think you took too much, call the poison control center hotline. We're the people you can trust.
SPEAKER_25: Hi, Rebecca Murray here from Mount Vernon, Washington. I'm a member of Radiolab's exclusive membership program, The Lab. My membership provides Radiolab with a steady source of funding so the team can continue to tell stories about our crazy world. And I get access to exclusive live events and bonus content. Join me in supporting the show we love. Sign up at radiolab.org slash join.
SPEAKER_06: Radiolab is supported by better help. Chaos is going to get you. Obstacles, conflicts, they are an unavoidable part of life. But what can be so frustrating is when you watch yourself getting in your own way, making things worse. Whether you find yourself dealing with racing thoughts that keep you up through a night when you are just trying to get a little sleep, or you start feeling worse and worse about something you wish you could have handled better. It can help to bring in an outsider to help you get out of your own way and feel more at ease and secure. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online and designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Make your brain your friend with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash radiolab today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelphlp.com slash radiolab.
SPEAKER_21: I'm Erlon Woods. I'm Nigel Poor. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia.
SPEAKER_17: When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California. And I was coming in as a volunteer.
SPEAKER_21: The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast.
SPEAKER_17: Like cooking meals in a prison cell. Keeping little pets. Prison nicknames.
SPEAKER_21: And trying to be a parent from inside.
SPEAKER_17: Stories about life on the inside, shared by those who live it.
SPEAKER_21: Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_09: And the U.S. can call whenever they need help.
SPEAKER_01: Boys in center. Are there certain times of day?
SPEAKER_09: Like is there a rhythm to the day generally? The usual pattern.
SPEAKER_22: It's busy in the morning. Kids are getting ready for school. The parents are getting ready for work.
SPEAKER_23: People brushing their teeth with muscle rub cream. Kids drinking a little mouthwash. Eating some sunscreen. Eating some old mayonnaise. Double doses in the morning.
SPEAKER_22: Each parent will give the kid ADHD medication. Then the mid-afternoon kind of tapers down a little bit.
SPEAKER_13: Until like 4 or 5 is the slowest. And then the evening. The busiest time of the day overall is like between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.
SPEAKER_22: And it's people coming home from work trying to get dinner.
SPEAKER_23: Super glue instead of eye drops.
SPEAKER_03: Super glue instead of lip gloss.
SPEAKER_22: People take the dogs or cats medicine by mistake instead of their normal medication. Yeah, that's a frequent scenario.
SPEAKER_23: At night it gets to be with adults.
SPEAKER_08: And I literally have a list here of all the things that have been used instead of lube.
SPEAKER_23: It's just busy. It's, you know, just a hectic schedule that we're living in right now.
SPEAKER_09: And Godalman's old stack of cards, that's become this huge database that's tracking like in real time these things that are cropping up. An outbreak of salmonella that may have made 22 people sick already.
SPEAKER_02: Whether it's a salmonella outbreak or like...
SPEAKER_19: The last 11 deaths appear to be connected to heroin being sold in western New York that's
SPEAKER_04: laced with fentanyl. A weird drug reaction that people are having or maybe it's a new product that's unexpectedly
SPEAKER_09: dangerous. ...laundry detergent pods that look like candy.
SPEAKER_08: Now they are being linked to a tragic death of a child.
SPEAKER_09: They can see that in real time and let health officials or whoever else know about it. Which is pretty cool. But I mean honestly just selfishly thinking about myself as a mom. Coming out of the trip to poison control I remember writing down this feeling of like, you know, what if I just approached all the scary decisions in my life the way that poison control did? Like what, like kind of thinking like what would poison control do? Like it just, it felt like such a relief to be experiencing... It was phenobarbital 64.8 milligram tablet.
SPEAKER_13: And how much does she weigh?
SPEAKER_09: Like this super rational place. Like it was just completely rational.
SPEAKER_13: And when did it happen?
SPEAKER_09: How long ago? We have this data. We're gonna take these questions from you.
SPEAKER_09: 9 25.
SPEAKER_13: Let me see if this is even gonna be a problem.
SPEAKER_09: And then we're gonna tell you this is what we think is gonna happen. Doesn't have any stomach pain now.
SPEAKER_22: And they'll let you make a decision or they'll tell you like straight up don't worry about
SPEAKER_09: it.
SPEAKER_22: I think she's gonna be a-okay from here on out.
SPEAKER_13: And then take it again but you will be okay. Okay?
SPEAKER_09: It just felt like it's stripped away a lot of the guilt and the anxiety and the like should I do this and politics and all those other things that often swirl around even seemingly to me innocuous questions about how do I keep this person this little person safe and healthy. There's all this stuff swirling around it and they just we didn't have to get into any of that.
SPEAKER_02: I still remains for me the most interesting part of this is the idea that we're supposed to know things like you know I talk about this with my dad I mean there was this time in medicine when it was all about the doctor in the white coat it was this paternalistic thing doctor knows best. And no one wants to go back there but there was something emotionally clean about that. Whereas now we have all the information it's right there this is hand in hand with the rise of the internet and so increasingly we're expected to be our own experts and it's usually presented as this sort of simple idea that information is power. And it isn't power I mean it is but it's also paralysis.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I really had a rule where I wouldn't I would only let Nick look things up because I couldn't like I was not it started when I was pregnant I like would have a panic attack because there were so many different things and like always the top searches are the ones that like you're going to die. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02: And you read it like you get into the comments field. Oh forget it. Oh God right. I mean there's something about when you look at an answer on a screen and you're just one click away from anything the exact opposite answer. And then when you're on the phone with someone it's just you and that person like there is no other distraction like there's something built into the technology that creates exactly the kind of connection you need at that moment. You know people when they call you it's an emergency they're panicking and I think half
SPEAKER_22: the battle is getting them to settle down.
SPEAKER_09: So this is Tony Burda the know everything guy we mentioned earlier. I started in February of 81.
SPEAKER_09: He's been that calm voice for 30 years and while he was in pharmacy school he had an accident.
SPEAKER_22: I actually started pharmacy school as a sighted person but I finished as a blind individual. What happened?
SPEAKER_09: He didn't want to say.
SPEAKER_22: Oh I don't want to dwell on it.
SPEAKER_09: But I was sitting there seeing him doing all of this math and spitting out these numbers.
SPEAKER_22: Receptor sites and half lives and volumes of distribution. Which is totally incomprehensible to me.
SPEAKER_09: But he told me that he also like pretty quickly had discovered early on that there was this whole other part of doing this job. That was in September of 82.
SPEAKER_22: Let's see I would have probably had like a year and a half of experience at that time. I remember I was sitting in the poison center with another pharmacist and we had the news radio a.m. station on. It was about 10 30 the morning. It was news news flash.
SPEAKER_00: A bizarre and terrifying story today in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village. A 12 year old girl and two men who were brothers are dead after taking poison capsules of extra strength Tylenol.
SPEAKER_22: Several people died from cyanide that they believe was from Tylenol. Five deaths in Chicago and that number might be changed to six.
SPEAKER_00: Six deaths have now been linked to the capsules which are laced with cyanide and linked to It was this terrifying moment where thousands of people just simultaneously were all thinking
SPEAKER_09: oh my God this thing I brought into my home to make me feel better. It could kill me.
SPEAKER_12: Today across the country Tylenol products were being pulled from the shelves. The police are like driving their cars slowly down the street with loudspeakers being like
SPEAKER_09: take back your Tylenol.
SPEAKER_08: Don't take any Tylenol extra strength to the time being until you hear otherwise.
SPEAKER_09: And so you know Tony told me he's sitting there hearing these news broadcasts going across the radio and he just turned to the guy sitting next to him in the poison girl center said holy s we're gonna we're gonna get killed.
SPEAKER_18: The phone has been ringing off the hook at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. It was just boom boom boom boom boom.
SPEAKER_22: As soon as you hung up the phone the phone rang again. We've been receiving calls about once every 15 seconds.
SPEAKER_22: This other pharmacist and I just grabbed the references and try to make ourselves cyanide experts you know real fast.
SPEAKER_09: And the interesting thing about this case is that in every single one of these calls that was coming in someone was terrified someone was panicked but they weren't actually in any danger.
SPEAKER_18: So in some way this moment if you think about it it really kind of highlights this thing
SPEAKER_09: that is really at the heart of poison control. The specialists not only were calm but they their job was to just reassure like they were letting people know it was going to be okay. If you flash forward to now that's changing. They're getting more calls that are more serious. They're getting calls from hospitals. They're getting calls from people who've taken multiple drugs. And so does that mean that they're getting less calls from like normal people and parents
SPEAKER_02: that kind of thing?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah those calls are going down and that and they calls overall since like in the past decade there have been fewer calls to poison control.
SPEAKER_02: Do you know why?
SPEAKER_09: My sense is we don't like to make phone calls anymore. People don't. You know the internet is there and that's what we're used to and that's easy. And so they are they just launched this new like instead of calling you can go to the website and plug in answers to the questions that they roll through and it will give you the same answer based on hopefully the same knowledge. But then as a person who's lived through it I'm like oh my God please don't take away that phone call because it when you're in that panic the thought of having to sit and type an answer out while you're holding your kid and like wondering if you really screwed up it's like you're taking away something really valuable that maybe we're not valuing here.
SPEAKER_08: I did have this one event when my older son I've got two sons was very little we were living in Sacramento.
SPEAKER_02: That by the way is author Deborah Blum again.
SPEAKER_08: And they didn't have fluoridated water so our doc gave them these tiny cute they were really cute fruit flavored fluoride pills the kind of thing you could get a toddler to take. I don't know what we were doing but somehow we had given him his daily fluoride pill and then like idiots left it on the kitchen counter and he grabbed it and pretty much inhaled the whole bottle. And I was really freaked. I just didn't know how poisonous that was going to be and I called poison control. You did. And I did. I was like am I supposed to what I wanted to know was whether I should panic. Right. I mean he seemed fine. It wasn't like he was getting sick in any way. And they were completely non freaked out about it. It was like. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that experience.
SPEAKER_04: Do you remember here. Did you hear their words or did you hear their tone.
SPEAKER_08: It was the tone. They were so calm and they could tell I was freaked. And I can just tell you I'm standing in the kitchen we had this phone. My son's by me. You know he can tell I'm free but he doesn't really know I'm free. And I sat on the floor after I talked to them. I just sat down on the floor with him because I was just so grateful. Right. And I was. And that's what I remember is how grateful I felt.
SPEAKER_14: You can't hear him. Hello. My two and a half year old daughter just ate most of the tube of a point eight five ounce thing of crust. You got some control. How may I help you? Yes. Hi there. I gave my son twelve and a half milliliters of children's Motrin. And what is his weight? He is about twenty five to thirty pounds.
SPEAKER_17: So. Zero point two four three percent.
SPEAKER_14: Zero point two four three. How about the child weight? She weighs. She drank from it. Darn it. Opiate green. This was a brand new tube which he ate. I'm good. It's a p5 amount. It is a bait station. That should not be the problem. Tero. Tero amped. Tero. T-e-r-r-o. Yeah. That's what it says. That's all I can see. It says others. Tero. Does it say anything? Chara and killer too or? No. Anything else you can read? Yeah. Four tubes. Five dots dry or five percentage. percentage it might be percent I'm not sure I what 5.5.4 maybe maybe yes 5.4 yeah also you said the borate 5.4 that's not a problem no no give her something to drink and she'll be fine yes definitely no no even close to the basketball toxic dose no this happens all the time yeah well she should be fine yeah all right well thank you so much for your help you know he'll be fine Wow let's let's see let's see you just put it at ease and I appreciate you
SPEAKER_20: very much
SPEAKER_16: calls to poison control are confidential by the way we got permission from the
SPEAKER_02: callers you heard to use the audio if you should ever need to call poison control the number is 1-800-222-1222 and if you text the word poison to seven nine seven nine seven nine it'll save the number in your phone
SPEAKER_04: Deborah Blum's latest book the poison squad is gonna come out this fall and you can find out more on our website thank you also to Nick Cappadice Wendy
SPEAKER_02: Blair Stefan Marion Moser Jones Andrew Parela Whitney Pennington Richard Dart and Natalie Wheaton this episode was reported by Brenna Farrell and produced by Annie McEwen with help from Jake Arlo I'm Chad I've been Ron I'm Robert Kralich thanks for listening
SPEAKER_16: and update from the future Lulu again Marty is now nine and Brenna said that
SPEAKER_06: in just the last year he and his brother have ingested things that required poison control to be called anyway so Brenna's family is doing their part of keeping poison control relevant big thanks to her big thanks to poison control and big thanks to you for listening catch you next week with a new one radio lab was created by Jad Aboumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler
SPEAKER_12: Lulu Miller and Madhav Dasar are our co-hosts Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design our staff includes Simon Adler Jeremy Blum Becca Bresler kitty Foster keys W Harry Fortuna David Gable Maria pause Gutierrez sin do Nana Samba them Matt Kielty Annie McEwen Alex Neeson Amy Pearl on a rascuit pause Alyssa John Perry sorry cari Sarah Sam back aryan whack Pat Walters and Molly Webster with help from Timmy Broderick our fact checkers are Diane Kelly Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton hi this is Tamara from Pasadena California
SPEAKER_24: leadership support for radio lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation science sandbox assignments foundation initiative and the John Templeton foundation foundational support for radio lab was provided by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation
