Radiolab - Rodney v. Death

In the fall of 2004, Jeanna Giese checked into the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin with a set of puzzling symptoms... and her condition was deteriorating fast. By the time Dr. Rodney Willoughby saw her, he only knew one thing for sure: if Jeanna's disturbing breakdown turned out to be rabies, she was doomed to die. What happened next seemed like a medical impossibility. In this episode, originally aired in 2013, Producer Tim Howard tells Jeanna's story and talks to authors Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik, and scientists Amy Gilbert and Sergio Recuenco, while trying to unravel the mystery of an unusual patient and the doctor who dared to take on certain death. Episode credits: Reported and produced by Tim Howard CITATIONS: Articles:"Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery," Wired article by Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik "Bats Incredible: The Mystery of Rabies Survivorship Deepens," Wired article by Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik "Study Detects Rabies Immune Response in Amazon Populations," the CDC's page on Amy Gilbert and Sergio Recuenco's work (inc. photos from Peru) "Selection Criteria for Milwaukee Protocol," when to try the Milwaukee Protocol Books:Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica MurphyOur newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Duration: 35m
Broadcast on: 02 Sep 2022
Audio Format: other

What happened next seemed like a medical impossibility. In this episode, originally aired in 2013, Producer Tim Howard tells Jeanna's story and talks to authors Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik, and scientists Amy Gilbert and Sergio Recuenco, while trying to unravel the mystery of an unusual patient and the doctor who dared to take on certain death.

Episode credits:

Reported and produced by Tim Howard

CITATIONS:

Articles:"Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery," Wired article by Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik

"Bats Incredible: The Mystery of Rabies Survivorship Deepens," Wired article by Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik

"Study Detects Rabies Immune Response in Amazon Populations," the CDC's page on Amy Gilbert and Sergio Recuenco's work (inc. photos from Peru)

"Selection Criteria for Milwaukee Protocol," when to try the Milwaukee Protocol

Books:Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica MurphyOur newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

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Hey, it's not that this is Radio Lab. Okay, go with me here for a second. Imagine all the diseases that afflict human beings. Imagine they all came together and had their own version of the Olympics. Okay, so events are like who could infect a human the fastest or who could infect a human from the longest distance or who could last in a human body for the longest. But imagine the most heated and heinous competition of all would be the deadliest. Like, what is the deadliest disease? Now, until I heard the episode you are about to hear, which first broadcast in summer of 2013, I would have been so confident that I could name, you know, all the gold medal contenders, like Ebola, AIDS, anthrax, now COVID. But no, this episode is about a disease I didn't even imagine was in the running. But in terms of mortality rate alone, it beats all of those diseases and every other one you could think of. This episode is also about a doctor and a patient who tried to beat those odds in the fall of 2004. Reported by one of the best and, if I'm being honest, most morbid producers we've ever had, Tim Howard. Here is Rodney versus Death. Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Ron. I'm Robert Grohl, which is Radio Lab, the podcast. Today on the podcast, a story about death incarnate and incarnate, I think. I think incarnate. That was Tim Howard, our producer. No, I'm sorry, am I in here? No, you're not supposed to be in yet. You're coming. You're coming. A story about death incarnate. And the man who, well, who thought he could beat death. Yeah. Are you Anne? Yeah. Comes from our producer, Tim Howard, but you're already here, so just start. Okay. So late last year, I took a trip out to Wisconsin. Test one, too. It was like that first weekend of November when we were out there for the live show. And I met this woman Anne Geezy to talk about her daughter, Gina. Do you want to tell me me just like, where are you sitting? What room? Crazy story. I am sitting in the kitchen of my home in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. All right. So anyway, back in 2004, in September of 2004, her daughter Gina was 15, sophomore. I remember it was homecoming week, so they had all activities each day and dress up days. And Gina's a volleyball player. And one morning, she just starts to feel kind of crappy. She started getting a tingling in her left arm. We thought maybe she had a pinch nerve or something. Thought nothing of it. Then she goes to a volleyball game. Somebody, I guess, sets the ball to her to spike. And she looks up and she sees two of them and she doesn't know which is the volleyball. Double vision? Yeah. About a week later, she started getting flu-like symptoms. She has headaches. She feels really sluggish. Each day, she just got more tired. One of those days, she does go to school, take the PSATs. But then the next day, she can even get out of bed. They go to the doctor and he says, "Well, it's not the flu." So we went home and then she just kept getting worse. Her arms started to involuntarily jerk. Her speech started becoming real slurred. Her body kind of stiffened up. Like it would get her up to go to the bathroom. And she just, it was just really scary. Weird how her body was just stiffening up. Anne and her husband, John, took her to a neurologist for some tests. Just trying to get down to the bottom of this, you know, and what is going on with her because meningitis came back negative. Everything else they were testing for came back negative. Were they running out of things to test? Yeah, they pretty much didn't know what else to do. And a day later, on a Saturday, Gina's hospitalized. And then on Monday, when her pediatrician, who had seen her on Friday, came in and saw her. And saw how much worse she was in just two days. He was like frazzled like, "What is going on here?" And then something just made me tell him about the bat. Bat? Yeah. So this was a month earlier. Gina and her family, they were at mass. It was St. Patrick's Catholic Church, you know, big church. And a bat was flying around and

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