Toxic Knowledge

Adrienne and Maureen were good friends. Since Maureen had no car, Adrienne was the one who drove -- to dances, movies, all sorts of places. They went everywhere together.

Adrienne had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder six years ago. She had been taking 1200 milligrams of lithium a day ever since. Now she was pretty much recovered. No more obsessive thoughts, two-year-long depressive episodes, or wild parties followed by miserable hangovers, just a steady friendship with Maureen.

One evening, Adrienne was supposed to take Maureen to a movie. She was putting on her coat to leave for Maureen’s place when she heard a gunshot. She couldn’t resist looking out the window. Out in the dark street she saw a dead body and a man with a gun standing over it.

The killer saw Adrienne standing at the window. Their eyes met, and it was sheer terror. Adrienne tore over to lock the door, but the gunman got there first. He clamped his hand over her mouth, picked her up, and pushed her into the trunk of his car.

Maureen paced her living room floor. Adrienne was late. Her policy was: if Adrienne didn’t show up within twenty minutes she got an annoyed phone call.

She waited twenty minutes, then placed the call. But Adrienne didn’t answer her phone. Was she on her way? After fifteen minutes more, Maureen called Adrienne's home again. Still no answer. Disgusted, Maureen took a cab to the movie, alone.

She called Adrienne again when she got home and again the next morning.

Adrienne's dreams were a nonsensical concoction of strange images, scenes shifting every second, and hideous sights and sounds arising from deep inside her unconscious mind.

Rough hands were shaking her. Adrienne pushed them away. She heard voices saying, “Wake up,” but just to try to open her eyes was torture.

But the voices kept yelling at her. "Wake up!” they called. “You've got to wake up!"

Finally she managed to force her eyes open. But wild colors and shapes spun around in front of her until she shut them again. "Who are you?" she tried to ask. But it came out, "Harroo?"

"You're right here in your home," someone female said.

"Coarse tremors of the hands and feet," she heard a male voice say. "Slurred speech, jerky movements, signs of blurred vision and generalized weakness. What's her name?"

"Adrienne," the female voice said.

"Adrienne, how much have you had to drink?"

"I don' drink," Adrienne said. She thought she heard someone laugh. She was furious! She tried to sit up and look the skeptic in the eyes. But that made her so dizzy that she passed out. 

Adrienne came to. She was in a fast-moving ambulance. The sires screamed, and she saw an IV tube dripping fluid into her arm.

Opening her eyes was not as uncomfortable now, so she opened them and looked around. There was a woman sitting next to her.

"Hi," she said to the woman. The woman jumped.

"Oh, you're awake!" the paramedic said.

"Am I sick or something?" Adrienne asked.

"You just had too much to drink," the woman said 

Adrienne recognized the woman's voice. "I told you, I don't drink," she said. She sat up.

Alarmed, the paramedic tried to push Adrienne back onto the gurney. But Adrienne shook her off.

"I'm fine," she said, speaking as distinctly as she could. "Look at me."

The woman looked. No tremors. No jerky movements.

"How's your vision?" she asked, holding up her watch. Adrienne read the correct time.

The ambulance stopped at the hospital door. The driver turned around.

"She's sober already!" the paramedic said to him.

"Then she couldn't have been drunk," the driver said.

At the hospital, Adrienne was given tests that revealed no alcohol in her blood, just lithium. Then the doctors knew that it was lithium toxicity that had triggered Adrienne's symptoms.

Lithium toxicity is a condition that occurs when someone who takes lithium doesn’t have enough water in his or her body. Lithium is a salt; you can die if your body doesn’t have enough water in it to balance out the lithium. But most paramedics don’t recognize lithium toxicity because its symptoms are very similar to the symptoms of drunkenness.

But the doctors recognized it. What they couldn’t understand was what had triggered Adrienne's dehydration in the first place. They asked Adrienne if she had been restricting her water intake.

"No," Adrienne said. "I know about lithium toxicity, and I know enough to get a drink whenever I'm thirsty."

"Were you sick last night? Fever, vomiting, diarrhea -- they all take water out of your body."

"I don't remember anything about last night," Adrienne said.

Finally, the doctors gave up. After all, she was OK now, except that she still bumped into things once in a while. They sent her home. A policeman, Frank Benton, gave her a ride.

"What's the last thing you remember happening yesterday?" he asked Adrienne.

It was a struggle, but Adrienne finally remembered being in her bathroom, getting ready to go to a movie with Maureen.

"So then you started driving to Maureen's?" Benton asked.

"I don't remember doing that."

"Well, you didn't make it to Maureen's, because she's the one who called the ambulance for you."

"Thank God! I would have died. I'm going to call her and thank – “ They got to Adrienne’s street.

“This is where I live," she said quickly.

Benton stopped, but then he turned the car around and headed right back to the hospital.

"Hey!" Adrienne said. “You’re supposed to be taking me home.”

"Don't worry!” he said. “This will only take a few minutes, and you'll help me catch a crook we've been after for a long time."

Benton rushed Adrienne back to the emergency room. He collared the first nurse he saw and said, "I want this young woman examined for needle pricks."

The nurse gave Benton a funny look, but she did the examination. On Adrienne's left thigh there was an almost-healed puncture wound. Another hour and it wouldn’t have been visible any longer. 

"OK," Adrienne said. "What's going on?"

"There's a new drug that erases a few hours of your memories and then disappears from your system really fast," Benton said. "You must have been injected with it last night.”

“But when?” Adrienne asked. “I was in bed all last night.”

“No, you weren’t. You saw a shooting last night, and the killer must have abducted you and shot you up with the memory-erasing drug.”

“So I wouldn’t call the police.”

“Um hmm. Once I got to your street, I remembered that a murder was reported there last night, and I put two and two together. You must have seen the killer from your window. He must have taken you somewhere, shot you up with the drug, then dumped you right back on your own bed, depending on you to think you’d been in bed all night." Benton opened the door for Adrienne. "I have to hand it to him; it was slick. He would have gotten away with it if you hadn't been on lithium."

"Maureen would still have called the police," Adrienne said. "But they would have found me healthy as ever and figured that I'd just forgotten our date."

"Right. But you weren't healthy. You had toxic levels of lithium in your body because you'd been deprived of water for so long. First, the killer must have taken you somewhere to get the drug to shoot you up with. Then the drug kept you sound asleep, so you couldn't get a drink."

"Thanks to Maureen, the paramedics got there and got that IV into me in time," Adrienne said.

Benton said, “I’ll take you home tonight, but please come in to the station tomorrow, and we’ll have a lineup ready.”  

“Sure,” Adrienne said. “I’ll get great pleasure from helping you catch the killer.”

Back To Top