Dr. Justin Feinstein

Keep in mind the context that I had just spent, you know, the past five years trying my best to find a way to scare SM.

And so my expectation is that her response was going to be blunted.

You would not see fear.

You would not see this extreme hyperventilation response.

She was her normal self.

We're hooking her up to all these different sensors to measure different things.

We're putting this breathing mask on her.

No sense of fear or anticipatory anxiety.

She seems very calm, talking to us, chit-chatting and whatnot.

She just takes a single breath of a bag of air that contains carbon dioxide.

One breath.

That's all it is.

And this is where things get interesting.

Within about a few seconds, she starts waving her hand saying, help me, help me.

And then she starts trying to tear off her face mask.

When you look at her eyes, her eyes were wide open like a deer in headlights.

Never seen that before in SM.

And then afterwards, when we talked to her, it took several minutes for her to calm down from this experience.

We asked her, what happened?

And her response was, I have never felt anything like that before.