What Made a Medical Resident Act 'Loco?'

Aug. 17, 2006 — -- A medical resident at a Delaware hospital had no idea what caused her one evening to suddenly see and describe things that weren't actually happening, and it was a medical mystery to doctors, too.

It had been a typical day for Hayley Queller.

She went to work at the neonatal intensive care unit and came home.

Her husband had prepared dinner -- turkey burgers and a salad.

After dinner, she read as usual, and then got ready to go to sleep.

That's when things changed.

"I was sitting in my bed, feeling a little bit lightheaded is the best way I could describe it. I felt very thirsty and like maybe I wasn't seeing clearly," Queller said.

"My arms were heavy. My legs were heavy. I couldn't even sit up if I wanted to. I started to maybe panic a little bit, because I felt like something was wrong."

Queller's husband, Sean Queller, remembers that she didn't look well.

He said she called out to him, "You have to take me to the hospital. I don't know what's wrong."

Dr. Jonathan McGhee of Christiana Care Health System, who knew Queller from their work at the hospital together, was surprised to see her in the emergency room that night.

Queller remembers how horrible she felt when McGhee greeted her.

"I felt like I was on fire," she said. "My heart was racing, and I was so thirsty."

"Her heart rate was in the 150s," McGhee said. "A normal heart rate is, you know, probably for her somewhere between 50 and 70."

In the emergency room, Queller's husband noticed her change drastically.

"She started getting kinda weird," he said. "She had no clue that she was saying things that didn't make sense."

"There were times where she was pretty lucid," McGhee said, "and then there were times where she was totally off the wall, speaking about things that weren't actually happening, speaking about things that weren't in the room. It made for quite a conversation."

Queller remembers people telling her that she didn't make any sense.

Although she had extensive medical knowledge, she still didn't know what was happening to her.

She was beginning to worry she was having a stroke or something that would cause irreversible damage.

Testing and Still No Answers

Doctors did a series of tests on her -- drawing blood to test for a thyroid problem, getting an EKG to test for a heart problem, performing an MRI on her head, and taking a urine sample to see whether she had any drugs in her system.

At the time, Queller says she was taking a medication for depression.

She said that doctors were under the impression that she was having a flare-up of her depression and thought they should bring a psychiatrist in to speak with her.

"I was thinking all the worst things," Queller said. "I kept feeling things like crawling on me. And I started to realize I'm hallucinating and I'm not really making sense."

After spending four days in the hospital, she was discharged, but without a diagnosis.

"They told me that nothing horrible was happening because all my tests were normal," she said. "But obviously something was still wrong."

She left the hospital with instructions that she shouldn't go to work.

Figuring It Out on Her Own

When she got home, she figured she felt good enough to go outside to her garden.

When she got out there, however, she saw a plant that had beautiful white flowers on it.

"It was growing right in the middle of the lettuce patch," she said.

When she saw the flower, she suddenly knew it was the cause of her undiagnosed physical problems because she had used that lettuce growing around it for a salad before she had gotten ill.

Queller took the plant to a nursery, where a worker looked at the plant and said, "Don't touch that. It's very toxic."

She informed Queller that the plant in her garden was jimson weed, loco weed or angel's trumpet.

Queller says the woman was astonished when she told her that she had inadvertently consumed it.

"She couldn't believe that I ate some of it, and I actually was there to tell her about it," Queller said.

All of Queller's symptoms fit the jimson weed mnemonic: Red as a beet. Dry as a bone. Hot as a hare. Blind as a bat. Mad as a hatter.

Jimson weed has been used as a medicine and intoxicant for centuries.

It is a weed that can grow as tall as five feet and is native to the United States.

It is most often used by young people to get high. Psychological effects include confusion, euphoria and delirium.

After recovering from toxic poisoning, Queller removed the remaining jimson weed from her garden.