One evening in November of 2016, a professor was sitting outside in his backyard during a torrential thunderstorm. The sky was black, rain and hail were falling everywhere, and all around him, all he could hear were countless sirens. The city was in the middle of a full-scale disaster. But this professor was not actually shocked because the day before, he had predicted this, and he had tried to warn people, but his warning had not worked. Now, people were dying in the exact way he knew they would. But But before we get into that story, 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, please buy the like button, a gift certificate to a massage parlor. But before they go in, make sure to replace all the massage oils with Honey and Fire ants. 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 story. At 5:30 PM on November 21st, 2016, Jody Santoro, who was a 21-year-old mother in Melbourne, Australia, woke up to the sound of her four-month-old son crying.

Outside, there was this horrible thunderstorm going on. All this rain and hail were pelting the roof, and the wind was so strong that all the windows in the house were rattling. Jody reached over and grabbed her phone on the night stand and checked the time, and she saw right away that she had overslept. However, it had been a really hot day that day, and she was so drained from the heat and also taking care of a four-month-old that she wasn't really surprised she had overslept. But as the sound of her son's cries intensified, Jody knew no matter how tired she was, she needed to get up and go tend to him. But the instant her legs swung off the bed and she actually tried to stand up, she knew something was wrong, and had nothing to do with being tired. She had this incredible sense of dizziness come over her, and then her chest suddenly tightened up to the point where she could barely even breathe in. She found herself grabbing the bed just to steady herself. However, as alarming as this was, Jody didn't panic. She knew this feeling. She had been dealing with asthma for years, and she knew this was the start of an asthma attack.

And so Jody reached over for her inhaler on the night stand. She picked it up, brought it to her lips, pressed it down, and then took in a measured breath of the medication. Expecting to pretty much immediately feel relief. But she didn't. The inhaler wasn't working. Jody, again, pressed down the inhaler harder this time and took a bigger breath in, hoping that a bit more medication might do the trick. But again, it just was not working. Now, with panic rising inside of her, she's still struggling to breathe. Her son is still freaking out and she can't tend to him. All she was thinking is, I have to get my nebulizer, which is basically a more robust version of an inhaler. It provides more medication more quickly into your body. However, the nebulizer, which was just over in her closet, required some setup. She knew she felt so frantic right now and she was shaking so much that she didn't think she'd be able to set it up or even set it up in time before she passed out. Just then, her fiancé walked into the bedroom, drawn there by the sound of their son crying.

But the second he walked in, his attention was not on their son. It was instead on Jody, who by now was clutching the bed and hobbled over and very clearly having some medical emergency. Jody turned him and began to say, I can't breathe. But her fiancé already knew she had asthma. He knew what these attacks looked like. Without even needing to be told, he rushed to the closet, set up her nebulizer, and then put the mask right over her face. And as soon as it was, Jody took in the biggest inhale she possibly could, really believing this was going to stop the asthma attack. But just like the inhaler, the nebulizer didn't work. It felt like with every breath she was taking, her lungs were shrinking, not expanding. And so Jody turned to her fiancé and croaked out, call an ambulance, her voice barely audible. And so her fiancé, who also was now beginning to panic, grabbed the phone, and as he was talking to the dispatcher, trying to relay all the details of what was happening. Outside, this thunderstorm was only getting worse and worse. The The tail and the rain were battering the sides of the house, and all the windows were shaking.

I mean, it was absolute bedlam inside of this house. The next few minutes were torture for Jody. She laid on the bed waiting for paramedics. Her breaths at this point were so small, so shallow, like she knew she was about to pass out any second. Then finally, the paramedics rushed inside. She knew there were two people in the room, but it was so chaotic. All she could say when they showed up in the room was, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. The paramedics lifted her off the bed. They put her on the and as they wheeled her out the door towards the ambulance, her world went totally black.

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The paramedics rushed Jody to Sunshine Hospital, and on the way, they tried to stabilize her by squeezing these oxygen bags, forcing oxygen into Jody's lungs. As they were doing that, Jody's fiancé was following the ambulance right behind, white-knuckling the steering wheel, praying his fiancé was going to survive this asthma attack. When the ambulance finally arrived at Sunshine Hospital, the emergency room was mayhem. Paramedics quickly wheeled Jody in on her girney, shouting out her vital signs to the doctors waiting near the door. Her fiancé meanwhile, watched helplessly as the medical staff surrounded her and inserted IV lines, hooked up monitors, and began intubating her to force even more oxygen into her lungs. But fortunately, this rapid medical intervention, once Jody got to the hospital, appeared to work. Because not long after getting there, Jody did begin to stabilize, not enough to suggest that she was actually all better, but her condition basically began to improve. However, the moment she began to improve, instead of the medical team talking to her and figuring out what happened and making sure she really was on a path to recovery here. Instead, the medical team literally ran out of her room back out to the front of the ER because by this point, the Sunshine Hospital ER was overflowing following with patients.

There were all these people in the waiting room and also outside, and basically everybody had the same symptoms as Jody. They couldn't breathe. There were people slumped on the ground against the wall, screaming for help. I mean, the medical team was totally overwhelmed. On top of that, there were ambulances literally lined up around the block waiting to drop off patients. There just wasn't any more space. But nonetheless, doctors and nurses and the medical team at the hospital worked furiously, moving from one patient to the next, sometimes Sometimes in an exam room, sometimes out in the waiting room, sometimes outside. It's wherever the patients were. But the weird thing was, is all these people, they had the same symptoms, these severe asthma attacks. Yet many of the people that were showing up had never had asthma in their lives before. How was this happening? This went on for hours and hours. Really, the situation in the hospital only continued to get worse, with more and more and more patients showing up with worse and worse symptoms. During this madness, Jody, who really hadn't gotten better, she just stabilized. She actually was moved out of the emergency room and over to the ICU, pretty much just to create one more space for new patients.

In the ICU, Jody's fiancé sat next to her, gripping her hand, listening to the sound of the monitors beping steadily all around her. Outside the room, he could see doctors and nurses and medical staff sprinting up and down the hallways, looking frantic and worried. He had no idea what was happening here. He just hoped Jody would be okay. But it would turn out there actually was someone who knew exactly what was going on. A university researcher named Philip Taylor had actually predicted this the day before. Professor Taylor was an expert in atmospheric allergens, a field so niche that barely anybody outside of his small research circle had even heard of it. And so on the afternoon of November 20th, the day before, Taylor had been at home in his office analyzing data when he noticed something very alarming. All of the ingredients for a catastrophic event were aligned raining in the forecast, and the patterns were so precise that it stopped him cold. Taylor was stunned. He'd spent years studying the effects of weather on public health, but he'd never seen anything like this before. At the same time, Taylor also realized that as alarming as this was, very few other people, if anybody, would see this as a problem.

He was like the one person in the world that had the expertise to see how catastrophic this might actually be. Desperate to warn others, he wound up posting a very urgent announcement on this weather website that he managed, but unfortunately, it just wasn't seen by enough people in time. Now, as hospitals all across Melbourne overflowed with people gasping for air, Taylor sat in his backyard watching the storm unfold. The sky was pitch black, rain and hail was coming down, the wind was whipping, and off in the distance, all he could hear was thunder and sirens. He knew, unfortunately, his prediction had been right. Just like Professor Taylor's weather models had predicted, on November 21st, 2016, Melbourne, Australia was hit by an extremely rare event known as Thunderstorm Asthma. This deadly phenomenon can only occur when three very specific weather conditions align. One, high heat during the day. Two, a very powerful thunderstorm. And three, extremely high pollen levels. Melbourne's heat that day had caused unusually high concentrations of ryegrass pollen to hang in the air. Then when that huge thunderstorm rolled in, the intense humidity, the wind, and the rain, shattered the pollen grains into microscopic fragments.

Then these tiny particles, which were way smaller than regular pollen, were carried by this storm deep into people's homes and into their lungs. Unlike normal pollen, these microscopic fragments bypassed the body's typical defenses and embedded themselves deep into people's lungs, causing severe and sudden asthma attacks. Now, for people who already had asthma, this was catastrophic. But even perfectly healthy people found themselves gasping for air, overwhelmed by the sheer density of this microscopic pollen. The storm had essentially made the air everybody in Melbourne was breathing, deadly. As for Jody Santoro, she would spend days in the ICU, hooked up to monitors with machines pumping oxygen into her lungs while her body fought to heal. But she was lucky. She would eventually recover. In the days that followed, she would learn the full scale of what actually happened in Melbourne. Nearly 10,000 people had flooded the hospitals across Australia complaining of the same symptoms that Jody did. Unfortunately, of those 10,000, 10 people actually lost their lives, and many of them were totally healthy and had never had an asthma attack in their lives before. For Jody, despite surviving this ordeal, the awful memory of what happened on that night will forever be on her mind.

She is now all too aware of how fragile life can be and how quickly things can change. I'm going to play you a clip from my other podcast, Mr. Ballon's Medical mysteries. After you're done listening to it, be sure to check out Mr. Ballon's Medical mysteries on any podcast platform. Give it a follow. New episodes every Tuesday. Enjoy.

Early in July of 1982, a corrections officer made his rounds at a jail in San Jose, California. Everything seemed normal as he inspected each inmate's cell. But as the guard peered into the last cell on the row, he was startled by what he saw. The inmate was sitting on his bunk staring forward, his mouth hanging open. He looked completely frozen, almost like something out of a wax museum. The guard gave the cell door a few loud knocks with his flashlight, but the inmate didn't move or even blink. The guard was afraid that the inmate was dead. So he unlocked the door and stepped into the cell, and he got right up next to the inmate, and when he did, he could feel breath coming from the man's open mouth. So he knew he was alive. He gently touched the inmate to try to get him to react, but he didn't. And that gentle tap made the man's whole body rocked back and forth on the bunk like a rocking chair. The guy was stiff as a board. The guard had no idea what was going on, and he was feeling very freaked out. But then he noticed the inmate's eyes.

They had a look of absolute terror in them. And the guard knew this man needed help right now.