Today, I'm going to tell two totally insane medical mystery stories. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. If that's of interest to you, the next time the like button is feeling down, give them a Jack in the Box toy to cheer them up. But make sure you don't give them a normal Jack in the Box. Instead, give them one that's filled with angry hornets. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's stories. On November second, 1848, a German doctor named Karl Heinrich August von Bührow was just opening up his private medical practice in East Prussia when a 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, What does the boy need? The teenager would say, Well, the boy is honking like a goose.

For a second, Dr. Von Buhreau 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 in carriage, and they told the driver to hurry up. When Dr. Von Buhreau 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. 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, out of nowhere. Then finally, when the coughing stopped and the boy tried to breathe in, his throat made this horrible honking sound. Her boy had come in the house, honking with every breath. In a panic, the mother had opened up her son's mouth and looked inside, but she hadn't seen anything. 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 clear up, that maybe it was just 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 had finally told the teen to go get the doctor. When the mother let Dr. Bonbureau 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 bluish, and he was sweating profusely. 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 couldn't quite grab it.

So he grabbed his forceps, which are 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, If I don't get in there and get this obstruction out, this kid is going to die. 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. 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. The doctor just reached in, scooped it with his finger, and pulled it out. 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 haunt like a goose was a literal goose larynx. The larynx is a hollow tube in your throat that helps you make sound. In humans, we call it the voice box. Right before this boy began honking, he was playing a game with his friends that involved taking recently mentally severed goosenecks and blowing through them like they were trumpets. At some point, as this boy was doing it, he began to cough for some reason. On the inhale, during one of these coughing fits, he had this gooseneck in front of his mouth. 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. If you're watching this video, then chances are good you are a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious.

And if that's true, then you're in luck because we, Balin Studios, just released a brand new Strange, Dark, and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries. Each week we'll explore new bizarre, unheard of diseases, miraculous recoveries, strange medical mishaps, and everything in between. Like all other shows that I host, each episode of Medical mysteries will end with a big plot twist. Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries is available on all podcast platforms, and it is 100% free. But if you happen to listen to it on Amazon Music, you can listen to an entire batch of eight episodes at once because we release them eight at a time on Amazon Music. But on all the other podcast platforms, we just put out one episode a week. And then once they catch up to where Amazon Music is, we drop another new eight episodes on Amazon Music, but continue doing one per each week on every other platform. The next eight episode Binge on Amazon Music is scheduled for Tuesday, January 30th. So be sure you go check out Mr. Balin's Medical mysteries on Amazon Music or wherever else you get your podcasts. And make sure you stick around till the end of this YouTube video because we're going to play a sneak peak of this coming Tuesday's brand new episode of Mr.

Balin's Medical mysteries, which is called The Curse of Veneto. On the afternoon of February first, 2013, a retired army veteran named Robert Smith limped his way into the emergency room at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, DC. Robert checked in at the triage desk, but then instead of sitting down with the rest of the patients who were waiting, he leaned up against the wall and just grimaced. Robert was in his late '60s, and up until just a few days ago, he felt like he was in the best health he had been in since leaving the service. Robert had gotten a kidney transplant a year and a half earlier, and after getting that operation, he really wanted to make sure he stayed healthy, and so he had been going on regular walks and eating healthy, and so really, he was doing great. But a few days ago, Robert had noticed this throbbing pain in his right hip that was shooting pain all the way down his right leg. He assumed this had to be from maybe overdoing it on one of his walks, but the pain had continued to get worse and worse over the last few days.

And so that was why he was finally here at the hospital. A nurse eventually called Robert's name. And so Robert, he came off the wall and hobbled over to her, and she led him down a hallway into an exam room. Once they got inside the room, the nurse would take Robert's vitals, which were all normal. And then after doing that, she said she was going to go out and get the doctor. A couple of minutes later, the doctor walked into the room and she reviewed Robert's chart and talked to Robert about his symptoms. And then afterwards, she concluded that very Most likely what Robert had was something called sciatica. Ciatica is pain caused by pressure on the sciatic nerve, which travels from the lower back down each leg. While sciatica is definitely very uncomfortable and very painful, It's not usually a big deal, and it typically clears up on its own without treatment. The doctor told Robert that he should just go pick up some Ibuprofen, so over-the-counter pain medication, and take that every couple of hours and just wait for this thing to pass, and then he'd be fine. Robert was totally relieved. He thanked the doctor, he thanked the nurse, and then he left and headed back to his home.

But despite doing what the doctor said and taking pain meds and just taking it easy, the pain in Robert's leg did not go away. Then on the morning of February fourth, so three days after Robert's trip to the ER, he woke up and not only was his right hip and leg still sore, but now when he tried to stand up, he couldn't put any weight on his right leg. It just felt too weak and it was tingly. Something felt off about it. Also, Robert felt very nauseous. Robert told himself that maybe what was going on here is he was taking too much Ibuprofen, and it was upsetting his stomach, and maybe it was also affecting his leg negatively or something. He didn't know. That day, he just sat on the couch and watched TV trying to tell himself that he was okay. It's just sciatica. Take a little less pain meds and you'll be okay. But that didn't work because the next day when he woke up, he was in even worse shape. Now, he not only had this pain pain and weakness in his right leg, and he had nausea still. But also, he now had this new pain in his abdomen that was located right around where the scar was from his kidney transplant, and Robert was also starting to spike a fever.

And fevers in transplant patients are a really big deal because a fever in a transplant patient could mean an infection. People who get transplants are then given medication that keep their bodies from rejecting their new organ or organs. This This medication works by suppressing that person's immune system. This prevents the body from mistakenly attacking the new organ, but it also means that if their body gets a real infection, they will have a really hard time fighting it off because, again, this medicine is basically stopping the immune system. When Robert saw he had a fever in conjunction with these other symptoms that were not going away, he knew he had to go back to the hospital because obviously, this was not just sciatica. Robert was too sick and weak to to the hospital, so he asked his neighbor to drive him. And as they were driving to the hospital, Robert basically sat in the passenger seat, rocking back and forth, not saying anything because he was so uncomfortable. And the neighbor, the whole time they're driving, they just kept looking over at Robert because not only did Robert look totally miserable, but also Robert was sweating profusely, so much so that it looked like he had just sprinted a 5K.

I mean, he was drenched in sweat. And so the neighbor's looking at him thinking like, What's wrong with this guy? Finally, the neighbor arrived at the hospital, and Robert, he managed to get out on his own, and he thanked the neighbor, and then Robert hobbled his way back through the doors into the ER. Then a few minutes later, Robert was in an exam room, and his doctor walked in, and she took one look at him and saw how horrible he looked. Without any hesitation, she said, You're getting admitted right now. It was clear to Robert's doctors that he had some virus or infection that his body was trying and failing to fight off. When they tested his blood, they saw his white blood cell count was elevated, which is a sign that the body's immune system is launching some a response. But the doctors didn't know what his immune system was responding to. Even though Robert had this acute pain in his abdomen around the site of the kidney transplant, his kidney seemed to be working just fine. And so whatever was going on with him didn't seem to be linked to his transplant. The profuse sweating did seem pretty odd, but considering Robert had a really high fever, it wasn't totally inexplicable.

Basically, Robert's symptoms were weird but generic. They didn't tell the doctors specifically what was wrong with him. They just knew something was wrong. So they just hooked Robert up to an IV and began administering a broad spectrum antibiotic, which is something that treats a whole variety of different infections. Then after that, the doctors just began testing Robert over and over and over again for all these different things that could be the cause for his illness. But every test they ran came back negative. At the same time, over the couple of weeks that they ran all these tests, Robert just kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker. His fever wasn't going away. He was still sweating profusely. His blood pressure was all over the map, and he had even begun drooling almost uncontrollably to the point where he didn't even speak because he was so embarrassed about it. But to the doctors, the scariest symptom that Robert was now showing two weeks into staying at the hospital was he was starting to act really confused. He didn't know where he was. He didn't know why he was there. And so that told the doctors that whatever his body was fighting, it had made its way up into his brain.

And so the doctors knew Robert did not have much time left, but they had tried every test they could think of, and Robert had tested negative for all of them. And so, as like a 'Hale Mary' because they had nothing to lose, the medical staff decided to just start testing Robert for basically completely random diseases that he almost certainly did not have. But basically, if any of these illnesses had a symptom that Robert had, they would test him for it. And all these tests came back negative, except for one. On February 22nd, so 17 days after Robert had been admitted to the hospital, this test came back positive. And when the doctors saw what he was testing positive for, they immediately assumed, this has to be a mistake. There is no way he has that. However, the only way to truly confirm that diagnosis was to literally cut into Robert's brain, which would kill him. And so obviously, they were not going to do that. So the doctors basically just had to take this diagnosis at face value, and they tried giving various medications to Robert, but it was obvious none of them were working.

And so the doctors felt like there wasn't much they could do, and they just began focusing instead on keeping Robert comfortable. And then finally, on February 27th, so 22 days into Robert's stay at the hospital, he would die from this mystery illness. During Robert's autopsy, the medical examiner was able to perform that test that doctors could not perform on him when he was alive, and that was to cut into his brain. When the doctor cut into his brain, he saw very clearly, without a shadow of a doubt, that, yes, Robert really was positive for that very, very rare virus, and it absolutely is the thing that killed him. But this was not the end of the case. Because the virus that killed Robert was not just rare, it was also highly contagious, which meant the doctors needed to figure out how Robert got this virus to protect other people from getting it, too. But the staff at this hospital knew they were not equipped to lead this investigation, and so they handed the case over to the centers for Disease Control or the CDC, which is the world's leading disease tracking agency. Investigators for the CDC began looking into Robert's case a couple days later.

They sifted through the days and the weeks leading up to Robert's hospitalization in an effort to try to retrace Robert's footsteps to figure out what made him sick. Now, they didn't have any leads. The only thing they agreed on was that very likely, even though Robert had that pain around his scar where the transplant was, that very likely the transplant did not have to do with whatever killed him because Robert's kidney had been working fine and his transplant had happened 17 months earlier, and typically complications from transplants will happen much sooner. They basically had ruled the transplant out as being the cause. But one of the CDC investigators decided to look into the transplant file anyways just to see if maybe something got missed or if Maybe there was some detail about the donor that was relevant to what happened to Robert. And so this investigator got the file and began going through it. Robert's donor's name was William Edward Small, and at the time of his death, he was 20 years old and serving in the Air Force. Now, none of that stood out to the CDC investigator, but William's cause of death definitely did.

Even though it really did not appear to have a connection to Robert, it was just so weird and unexpected. The CDC investigator would read that back in September of 2011, William was out fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, and he caught a fish, and he ate that fish, and it gave him something called ciguitero poisoning. Siguitero poisoning is something you get when you eat a fish that contains microalgae toxins. And so William, he ate this fish that was contaminated, and not long after that, he had died. But when the CDC investigator read through all of William's symptoms before he died, they basically exactly lined up with all of Robert's symptoms. William had developed pain and weakness in his extremities. He developed a very high fever. He became nauseous. He also lost the ability to swallow. And then he became totally confused and then died. When the CDC investigator saw this incredible coincidence, she knew she was onto something, but first she would need more information about William. Very quickly, the CDC got in touch with William's family, and they asked them all these questions about William. Finally, after hearing the answers from the family, the CDC finally figured out what actually happened to Robert and what actually happened to William.

It would turn out William was not just a fisherman, he was also a hunter and a trapper. He was also a hunter and a trapper, and he had a very specific way he would go about training his hunting dogs. He would capture wild raccoons and use them as live bait to train his hunting dogs how to hunt. Now, William was always very cautious with these wild raccoons, but in the year and a half leading up to his death, he was bit two different times by raccoons. It was one of those two raccoon bites, not some toxic fish in the Gulf of Mexico, that killed William and killed Robert. William did not die from ciguitero poisoning. He died from rabies, and the rabies virus that was in his kidney was still present when it was taken out of his dead body and transplanted into Robert's body. And so that was how Robert got rabies. Rabies can look like the common flu at first. People feel achy and nauseous. They get fevers. Their stomach starts to hurt. Some people affected by rabies will drool uncontrollably, like Robert, or they'll lose the ability to swallow, like William. But for everybody who contracts rabies and who does not get a vaccine right away, because a vaccine does stop rabies in the early stage.

So if you don't do that, everybody dies. That's what rabies does to you. It kills you. Now, you'd think maybe we should be testing organs for rabies before they get transplanted. But you got to remember that rabies is so, so rare. Only one or two people a a year in the entire United States will die from rabies. And so it's just not something doctors are going to screen for because the percentage chance that they could have rabies is basically zero. Ultimately, Robert was not the only person who received an organ transplant from William. There were three other people that received his organs. Luckily, though, the CDC was able to track those three people down, and all of them were totally healthy and not showing any signs of rabies, so either they didn't have it or they were super early stage, which meant they were eligible for the rabies vaccine. They all got the vaccine, and they lived happily ever after. As promised, here is a sneak peek of this coming Tuesday's brand new episode of Mr. Ballon's Medical mysteries. The episode is titled The Curse of Veneto. Enjoy.

In the summer of 1983, a middle-aged Italian man held his mother's hands as they swayed about on a dance floor. His mother was in her 90s and was not able to get out very much, so this was an extremely special occasion. And this particular dance floor was on a cruise ship sailing on the Mediterranean Sea. It was an unbelievable experience he knew they would never forget. Then a slow song came on, and as they dance together, the man began to feel abnormally hot. Sweat ran down his chest and underneath his tuxedo jacket, his hair stuck to his neck, and when he touched his forehead, his hand came away wet. He told his mother he'd be right back, and then he left the dance floor, took off his jacket, and walked to the cruise deck, hoping the ocean breeze would cool him down. But when he got up there, he didn't cool down, and instead, he just kept on sweating until his dress shirt was completely drenched. The man finally just ran to a bathroom in one of the cruise ships's long hallways, and he ran right over to the sink, turned on the cold water, and splashed it on his face.

But when he looked up at his reflection, he couldn't believe what he was seeing, not because of how much he was but because when he looked at his eyes, he could see his pupils had shrunk to two tiny pinpricks. Suddenly, he knew exactly what was wrong. He stared at his sweaty reflection and told himself he would go back out there on the dance floor and he would enjoy this night with his mother. He had to make every second count because he was certain he'd be dead within a year.

So that's going to do it. I hope you enjoyed the sneak peak. Go check out Mr. Ballon's Medical mysteries on Amazon Music or wherever else you get your podcasts. Wait, don't go anywhere. If you're looking for more strange, dark, and mysterious videos, click here.