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Chapter 1: What health challenges did Ora face and how did she respond?
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Desperate times, my friends. Go for desperate measures. Ora was in college when something mysterious happened. She was at her computer, editing.
And I was editing, editing, looking at this computer, and my eyesight started to go blurry. And I just couldn't really see the computer that well. And I was like, I need to stop. I can't really see anymore. And I was walking home, and everything's just blurry.
An eye doctor examined her, said there was nothing wrong with her eyes to cause the blurriness.
And then, oh, I remember I had weird heart palpitations. So I went to the doctor to get an EKG, and they were like, you seem fine. Maybe you're just in love.
Pause on that. That was really a thing that happened to you? You showed up with medical symptoms, and they said maybe you're in love?
Yeah.
She was actually falling in love, but she did not think that explained the heart palpitations. She was starting to get the feeling that people were not taking her seriously, and things were getting worse.
It just feels like everything in my body is breaking in a weird way. Terrible fatigue, horrible brain fog. And this feeling in the left side of my brain, just like, the best way I can describe it is I feel like an ice cream scoop has been taken out of my head.
Symptoms like that come and go for two years. Blurry vision, her legs are weak and tremble, her throat swells up and it feels like she's being strangled. And then some stuff is constant. She's exhausted but can't sleep. Pressure headaches. It's hard to think. This derails her life. She's always taking time off from work or showing up late in the day.
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Chapter 2: What desperate measures do lawyers take to save clients from execution?
Leads her to believe that she may have Lyme disease. Even though she'd already been tested for Lyme disease and it came up negative. No Lyme. A different doctor now tests her again, and this time she tests positive for Lyme. So the doctor prescribes the standard treatment for Lyme, doxycycline, this antibiotic. Doesn't work for her. Then she spends two years on other antibiotics and other drugs.
Those fail too. Maybe it's possible this is because she didn't really have Lyme disease. That second test she took for Lyme was not an FDA-approved test. This is the nightmarish world of Lyme. This whole debate over who really has it and who just has symptoms. From Laura's point of view, the question was moot.
Chapter 3: How do migrants communicate from detention centers?
She had the symptoms. She wanted them gone. Regular doctors weren't doing it. So she started looking at all the other treatments that people try for these symptoms. And there are a lot of them. She does sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, gets inside an infrared sauna.
I tried this like elimination diet where all I could eat was like grapefruit and goat cheese and oatmeal. I tried like a very intense regimen of Chinese herbs that a doctor in New York City invented and manufactured himself. But at every turn, you're like, am I being preyed upon? I'm spending so much money.
And this drag's on for years. She's floating in this unpleasant vortex in interstellar medical space where nobody's got answers. Things get so bad that she leaves her job in the middle of her contract because it was too hard to make it through the day. She moves from New York to the Arizona desert, thinking that might help. And now it's five years since her symptoms first appeared.
I was just looking down this road that looked really bleak. And this was around the time when I was working with a chronic disease life coach who was starting to say things like, well, Ora, what would it be like if you never get better? Why don't we start thinking about that? Like to have kind of radical acceptance.
And I felt very resistant to that, but sort of teetering on the precipice of like giving up.
It was at this point that Ora's mom heard about somebody in Ora's situation who supposedly got cured and sent Ora to that doctor. And he suggested a treatment where he was going to put a common product, this is something you get at any drugstore for cheap, into her veins with an IV. I am not going to tell you what this product is because this is so unproven.
The Centers for Disease Control has said there is no evidence that this works. In fact, this is a toxin. It would do equal damage to healthy and diseased cells. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has warned against trying this because the dangers outweigh these utterly unproven benefits. But this doctor...
He thought that would cure it, but he seems very confident. And his explanation for why I hadn't heard of this before was because it's so accessible and so cheap and so affordable, Big Pharma doesn't want you to have it.
Now, when someone says an argument like that to you, are you the kind of person who's like, yes, I'm in because I hate Big Pharma? Or are you the kind of person who's like, I don't know. That's what crazy people say.
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Chapter 4: What unconventional treatments did Ora try for her illness?
It's true. The danger of this particular treatment is that it might kill you. With, again, no solid studies showing that it works. And when you showed that to her, what did she say?
She was freaked out by it, obviously. but was just kind of like the current state and how I feel also isn't sustainable. I really, my preference would be to have a sister who is sick and alive rather than a dead sister. It's like you'd prefer to have a sister who is sick and alive than one who is dead. And it's like not to be overly dramatic.
Like I certainly didn't want to die, but I was like, I don't want to be the sister who's sick and alive. Like this really sucks. And my current state is just so unpleasant and so confused and exhausted. Like, it was just, like, reaching a point of, like, this is not a way to really live.
Yeah.
If there was a chance it could work, I wanted to try it.
This is like a Hail Mary pass.
Yeah. Total Hail Mary.
So, fully knowing that this could kill her, she got the IVs. Four of them, over a few weeks. And this is not really the result I would have predicted, but... her symptoms went away. The ice cream scoop in her head, the brain fog, the fatigue, the achiness, all of it. Maybe the IV treatment had something to do with this. Maybe it didn't.
I've now spoken with three Lyme experts and researchers who could not explain this result. They said this is the kind of thing that you would want to do a proper scientific study on because the world is filled with things that seem to work in one isolated case and then really don't prove out. I also managed to reach Ora's doctor,
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Chapter 5: What was the outcome of Ora's risky treatment decision?
Everyone is half interrupting each other. Ramona tells us the Mohawk guy is actually her husband. She moved out of state and is just back to do renovations. She seems excited to talk to Greg, but says the house is too much of a mess to invite him in. She suggests another spot.
I mean, there's like a Whataburger up the street, right around the corner.
Your husband said you might have, like, files and records still.
I still have all of the old articles. I have everything.
Naomi and Alvin meet us at the Whataburger. As the only native Texan in this group, I feel obligated to say Whataburger is a state institution. But it is not a great place to do an interview. There's loud music, soda fountains and fryers going, people coming in and out. Ramona blazes in. Big, expressive face. Her hair is wild and curly. Some of the layers dyed cherry red.
She slaps down this giant binder, very dusty, that says Mona's Articles, she also goes by Mona, in cursive letters next to what looks like a cigarette burn. It's full of old newspaper clippings that leave flakes on the table. Apparently, all those years Greg was developing his theories of what really happened in 1987, Ramona was nursing her own.
El Paso is a pretty big city, but Ramona talks about it like a small town. David Wood, the police, the victims, their parents, everybody knows everybody, as if somehow they all went to high school together. Even this Whataburger is relevant in a way. Ramona tells us she got involved in this case because of her best friend, Cheryl Vasquez.
When they were still teenagers, Cheryl married Ramona's brother, which made them best friends and sisters-in-law.
And Cheryl... She worked right here at this Whataburger. This is where she worked. When she went missing, she was working here. And she never even got her last check from this place because she was gone.
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Chapter 6: How does the legal system handle death row appeals?
So she told you this in...
After David Woods arrested in October of 1987... He was already charged with her rape.
You can tell in Greg's voice how much he would love to poke holes in Judith Kelling's credibility. It's something he's been trying to do for years. For example, he found one source who gave a sworn statement to the court that Judith Kelling had been a police informant, and specifically that she'd been Detective Johnny Guerrero's informant when she reported her rape.
Judith also spent long stretches in jail around this time on drug charges. On top of that, Gregg has noticed that her story of what exactly happened in the desert kept changing, getting more and more aligned with other things the police believed about David Wood and the murders. Gregg uses these points to make an argument in court filings.
Desperate to solve the murders, Detective Guerrero squeezed an equally desperate Judith Kelling to point the finger at David Wood. We asked Detective Guerrero about all of this, and he denies that Kelling was ever his informant. Judith Kelling died a decade ago, so Greg can't ask her about it.
But here, in this Whataburger, Ramona claims Kelling revealed much more to her about what really went down.
This is what she's telling me. They made a deal with me to get me out of jail, and all I got to do is testify against this guy. I was like, well, were you even raped?
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of wrongful convictions in capital cases?
She's like, yeah, but not by him. I'm like, who? She said Mike Plyler. I'm like, who's this guy?
Mike Plyler? What? The same guy Greg asked about at the courthouse a few hours ago? The one I thought was a long shot? I look over at Greg, and I can see he's just as surprised. He's barely able to contain himself, nodding so hard it's like he's swaying. Ramona says that after she got Mike Plyler's name from Judith, she and her mom looked for the guy and, well, basically stalked him.
They staked out his apartment, watched him come and go. They were blown away by the similarities between this man and David Wood. Similar builds, similar tattoos. On top of the similar trucks, they also both drove red motorcycles. I can practically see the gears turning in Greg's mind.
And as the Whataburger fills with the sound of someone making the world's loudest milkshake, he tosses out one more question.
Do you have any information about this nickname Skeeter that supposedly is... That's Skeeter.
My father's Skeeter.
Well, when you say that, how do you know that he's Skeeter?
Because that's what Judith called him. Is that right? That's what she called him. She called him Skeeter.
So that's Skeeter.
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