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In the heat of August, in a forest near Le Mans, the King of France snaps, murdering five of his own men in a frenzied delusion.

Before long, this beloved ruler has collapsed into madness, believing he's made of glass.

Step inside a kingdom on the brink of shattering.

This is history presents the Glass King.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Blink is intended for mature audiences as it discusses topics that can be upsetting, such as drug use, sexual assault, and emotional and physical violence.

Content warnings for each episode are included in the show notes.

Resources for drug addiction and domestic abuse can be found in the show notes and on our website, blinkthepodcast.com.

The testimonies and opinions expressed by guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or affiliates of this podcast.

When something unthinkable happens, it's only human to ask, why me?

It's a question Jake has wrestled with for years, one he asked in silence when no one could hear him.

And even now, as he pushes his body through cruel therapy and fights for every inch of mobility, That question still lingers quietly, constantly.

Jake's mind spiraled through possibilities.

Was it years of drug use catching up to him?

A bad batch?

Fate?

Or was something,

someone,

pushing him toward this outcome?

As friends and family opened up, sharing candid thoughts about his addiction and his relationships, a troubling theory began to take shape.

Could Jake have been poisoned?

For two years, it remained just that.

A theory.

To many, it sounded impossible, far-fetched.

Maybe even a way for Jake to shift blame away from himself and his drug use.

But then, out of nowhere, Jake received a Facebook message from someone he didn't expect.

Someone with a strikingly similar suspicion.

This is January 4th, 2022 at 1 a.m.

I'm actually in an Uber with Justin at 1 a.m.

And I see a notification on my Apple Watch.

At the time Jake received the message, he was in an Uber with Justin, one of his first friends he made after beginning his recovery.

Justin also happened to live in our apartment complex.

I put my wrist down and I don't look at this for

three or four days.

Also, it was Facebook Messenger to the J Handle Recovery Facebook account, which I check very infrequently.

Here's how the message starts.

Are you available to chat?

I hope it's not weird.

If it makes you uncomfortable, I totally understand.

But I need to clear something up regarding L.

When I saw regarding L, I was like, hmm, interesting, because

only her mom and really close people and me call her L.

The message continues, I really wanted to get your side.

I know you loved her, although I don't know you, and I've never met you.

For some reason, I knew that without question.

And I hope to find some insight regarding my friendship with L if you're willing.

And then the message concludes with, I think your recovery and your success story was inspirational.

I'm glad to hear you're recovering.

Three days later, 4 or 9 p.m., my answer, hi, what do you want to ask?

A response comes in 20 minutes later.

I'm the guy she supposedly tried to track down in the West in Seattle.

So, this person is claiming to be the ex that Ellen had plans to see when she was fixing up her RV when she and Jake first started dating.

The message continues, talking about his personal relationship with Jake's ex-wife, and then questioning Jake's relationship, writing comments like,

I was just curious about her behavior while you were married.

She seemed very dedicated to you.

Again, I apologize if this is inappropriate, and I understand if you don't feel comfortable responding.

I'm Ella Welling in my head, by the way.

Another message, more complimentary.

I knew do you love her and probably tried just as hard, if not harder, to meet her demands.

Okay, obviously he's texting with voice.

Something I do a lot too.

Another message.

Sorry, I meant I could tell you loved her.

And then

a line that completely rattled Jake.

Do you think she poisoned you at all?

Now, here's where Justin, Jake's friend from the Uber ride, comes into the story as a witness to some of these exchanges.

I met Jake here in the summer of 2020, and then over the next several years, became super good friends.

I was one of his first friends in his new life, and I think we were drawn to each other by our energy to

grab life by the horns and do interesting stuff.

And I got into a story, and then we just hung out more.

And I was like, this kid is different.

I don't know what it is about this kid.

He's just like different.

Like, he's funny.

He's the most engaging person in the world and he's gone through all this crazy shit.

Anyway, we went to dinner with me and my friend Rich and Jake, he was like,

damn, this is my first time going to dinner, being out of the hospital.

Like, this is awesome.

That night, he went to the bathroom.

We let him go on his own.

And he got trapped in the bathroom because the lock was too small for him to like unlock himself out of the restroom.

Jake had been nervous to go out because he didn't know if a place was accessible to him, even if it said it had things like an accessible bathroom.

And Justin was shocked to hear that nothing like this existed.

So Jake pitched him an idea.

And Justin, who was the founder of Drizzly, thought it was a great one.

The two went on to co-found Ahoy, an app that allows users to review and view the accessibility of businesses.

Jake is full of good ideas, and he's a great person to go to dinner with.

He told me his whole story or, you know, obviously like the first day I met him, I was like, damn, that's the craziest story I've ever heard.

And it probably took him like a year for him to be like,

yo, I have this crazy theory.

I like don't talk about it very often.

He's like, does it make sense that I ingested something that a bunch of other people did and ended up in this position?

I have this theory that like,

you know, maybe Elle did something.

And I was like,

shut up, dude.

Like, no way.

That's like completely impossible that that would happen.

I don't know her.

He told me all the reasons why, but like, it's all just him making some assumptions based on data that he had only himself.

But all of the other data points related to her taking relatively good care of him, it seemed like she wanted him to survive, right?

So I was like, that's a totally crazy thing.

And he would like bring it it up every once in a while.

And I'm like, dude, stop.

You can't let that be in your brain.

Like, that's not healthy for you to be living thinking that she could have done something, right?

But then, two years after Jake and Justin met, and two years after Jake's divorce, the two are in an Uber together when Jake receives this first Facebook message from a man claiming to be Ellen's ex-boyfriend.

Let's go back to the original Facebook message thread.

After Jake was asked, Do you think she poisoned you at all?

Jake responded with,

This is strange, homie.

I'm unsure if this is for real.

Your profile looks fake.

I would not be surprised if this is Elle.

The response is classic.

That answers my question perfectly.

She would do that.

It's all good, man.

I understand if it's strange.

Apparently, she told you.

all about me but that's probably a lie as well it's probably why she never would let me have friends or introduce me to hers.

Thank you for getting back to me and letting me vent for a moment.

Jake, skeptical that this is actually Ellen, writes back: Wait for my book.

Good luck if this is Ellen.

A response.

It's not.

You can call me if you'd like.

So my head is kind of spinning here, and this leads to a 23-minute audio call.

And I'm still

sorry

I'm still kind of like I think this is L.

I don't know.

I was home and he just called me and he was like clearly distraught and I was like, what's going on?

He's like, dude, I just got this text message.

Like, where are you?

Can you come down now?

And I was like, sure.

So I was with my girlfriend.

We both came down and Jake was like noticeably shaking, like almost hyperventilating to some extent.

And he showed me the string of texts from her ex-boyfriend and then i can tell she loved you do you think she poisoned you at all unprompted which like jake had only ever had this theory kept it to himself only told people super close to him this is a guy that he's never met i don't think reached out with a paragraphs of texts and then it ended with one text that said do you think she poisoned you at all So Jake is, and I'm even getting goosebumps now thinking about it because like we're in this room in his apartment, like freaking out you know to get like an unprompted text that's really

insanely

accusatory to some extent without any prompting i went from being like get that out of your head stop thinking about it it's not healthy for you to have that theory to holy shit maybe she did it crazy crazy

so then we're like okay what do we do with this information how to where do we go from here you know he's like do i respond should i try to call him

And I was like, I think you should call him and just like start creating a relationship.

Because based on the text, I think it was clear that he, they had broken up like super recently.

And that's why he felt comfortable reaching out.

I'm sure.

Let's give, let's give him a phone call.

We were like, should we record this?

And I had just been through something with work.

And I think Jake knew too that Massachusetts is a two-party consent state to record something.

So we didn't record it.

And the whole message to Jake was like, let's just let him talk.

You know, clearly, he has something to say, or he wouldn't have reached out like this.

So, don't like spook him, basically.

And let's get as much information as we can.

Let's just let him talk and see where it goes.

It's on speaker, and I call, and he's like, Yo, I'm like, hey, and he's like, Snarl L.

And I'm like, I see that.

I'm still

skeptical.

She's probably in the room.

And he's like, After she told me you had died, I'm on the couch.

I see you on CBS Sunday morning.

Why would you lie to me about that?

I could tell he was in crisis and he was definitely enraged.

I'm like, tell me about, like, why you think she's crazy, you know?

And he's asking me some questions that I'm not really answering.

And he's like, well, for one,

she has all your hospice meds still.

And I'm like, what?

And he's like, bro, it's a lot.

It's like 50.

And I'm like, uh-huh.

What's she doing with him?

And he's like, I don't know what the hell she's doing, but she makes him up every morning.

I'm like, AY, this is now essentially two and a half years after hospice.

And apparently she lives in.

Like, why would you travel across the country with these two and a half-year-old hospice meds?

And these aren't like party drugs.

These are like some weird medications for when your body is shutting down.

And I'm like,

why is she doing this?

And he's like,

I don't know.

I moved out here, brought this new dog, puppy, and

a couple weeks later, dog lost all his hair, lethargic.

He's probably poisoned that dog.

And I'm like, yeah, speaking of that, why would you

say,

do you think?

She poisoned you and he's like, oh, she talks about it.

And I'm like

what

and he's like yeah yeah she she she talks about it and i'm just like

i'm shaking

i remember when jake called me after this call happened he was freaking out he told me before that there were some big question marks around why he'd gotten sick so Let's take a moment to explore why Jake had started to suspect that his stash may have been tampered with.

First, the heroin stash that he had been smoking just before his diagnosis seemed off.

He called Adrienne, his ex-girlfriend and supplier, asking about the batch.

Here's Adrienne telling Jake about her memory of this realization.

You told me that it tasted funny.

I remember you calling me and you were driving and you were like, this stuff tastes different.

Did you guys do anything different to it?

And I said, nope, it's the same shit that we've had for.

however long like nothing's changed and i think you tasted mine at one point you were like yeah, yours tastes normal.

Cause we had the same stuff.

So it should have been exactly the same.

And I was like, it's the same, dude.

I don't know what to tell you.

It's not like it was a new batch or we had mixed it with something different or anything like that.

Like it was, it was the same.

It was the same for like a month.

I didn't get sick.

Nobody else got sick that I know of.

It was just Jake and I thought it was so weird.

Like, why all of a sudden, what was in it that could make him so sick?

It was the same stuff he was doing, you know, the week before and there were no effects from it.

I asked other people if anybody had bad side effects and everybody was like, no, it's the same as it has been.

I asked Adrian what this was like for her, knowing his heroin tasted off to him and then his impending diagnosis.

For a really long time,

I carried a ton of guilt because I'm the one that sold him the stuff that made him so sick.

So for so long, I was like, I killed this kid.

I can't believe, like, I

still have like a really hard time with that.

Up until the day that Jake was diagnosed, which is when his dad, Darone, quit smoking heroin cold turkey, Darone had also been smoking from this same batch.

I didn't notice any difference.

I mean, I asked Jacob about that too.

What was something different about yours?

I mean, it's weird.

Didn't make sense.

We were both using the same drugs that came from the same person, from the same batch.

How come I was okay?

Somebody did something.

There were already concerns about Jake's dash before his diagnosis.

Something seemed off.

Did it taste strange because he was getting sick?

An early symptom no one recognized?

But the food he ate tasted normal.

And the heroin he smoked of Adrian's after telling her his was off tasted normal, and then the heroin Adrian brought him in the hospital when he was being diagnosed with acute toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy also tasted normal.

Whatever was wrong, it seemed specific to his cut, the one he kept at home.

Once admitted to the hospital, Jake was upfront about his drug use.

Jake recalls a conversation about his heroin being brought in for testing, but Jake also recalls that that sample was never brought in.

It wasn't until he began recovering that the pieces started to fall into place.

Could it be possible, however unthinkable, that his heroine had been tampered with?

People like Justin dismiss this idea as absurd, and Jake himself wasn't sure.

He never spoke about it publicly, not in his Reddit posts, podcast interviews, or news articles.

Even he doubted his own thoughts.

Was he just bitter?

Was his mind reaching for answers after surviving the impossible?

A man with a new body, a new perspective, yet still searching for the why.

But then came the messages from this man on Facebook Messenger.

And then the call.

Unprompted, unexpected, yet confirming Jake's deepest suspicions.

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He also said at some point, every time you're in the media, she gets really mad.

You know, she never wanted me to tell this story, and and now it's all making sense.

And what?

It's just like weird.

I asked Justin if he thought that the supposed ex-boyfriend was becoming suspicious that perhaps the call was being recorded.

Yeah,

probably.

He started to get wary.

Jake was probably pissed at me that we didn't record it.

It wasn't recorded, but there were the Facebook messages.

Written evidence of another man's identical theory.

That was the most,

to me, the most tangible third-party proof that I had ever heard or seen.

That would say, damn, this theory that Jake has always had might be real.

The way the call ended was, I just stole her car, and I'm about to drive it off a cliff.

He didn't make it sound like he was going to kill himself.

He made it sound like he was going to put a rock on the guest, but I'll put in a drive and watch it go down a cliff because

that's how much

she was

pissing him off.

The call had ended, but for Jake and Justin, the conversation wasn't over.

We were like, okay, how do we respond to him to like

keep it friendly, like to keep a relationship of some sort?

So Jake types out a message on Facebook Messenger.

Jake writes, Dude, I can't stop thinking about the poisoning thing.

Like, did she ever hint at the fact that she actually did that?

The response says, yeah, she joked about it actually.

Said you were practiced leading to and for my demise, but also showed disdain for the topic later and decided not to joke about it.

What do you think?

Were there any red flags?

And then this man pivots the conversation to drug use.

And then never heard from him again.

I find it strange that on the phone, there was hesitancy to discuss this theory, yet he had no problem typing it out, leaving behind a much more concrete record.

I find the choice of the word poison bizarre too.

When discussing drugs, people usually use the word laced, which doesn't carry the same weight or intent as poisoned.

In our conversations, there was a lot of reason to believe that that could have been possible.

But as his friends in his new life trying to help him recover, it's like that's not gonna

help you move on and get better.

But, but for me, that genuinely changed with that text message.

And then the phone call too, but like the text, because you can't mince words in text.

That's completely crazy.

And I don't know if in candidly, I don't know if in the heroin community, if like this concept of poisoning is a thing.

And so you would, that's like a joke that people make.

Like it wouldn't have even entered my mind.

I just was like, heroin is a bad thing.

It makes sense that maybe you inhaled like something in the tinfoil or something.

Who knows?

Like, it just isn't good.

So, like, it's going to put you in this position at some point, which I think is most people's assumption when they hear this story is that they're like, it's heroin, dude.

Like, heroin is meant to kill you.

So, yeah, it probably killed you.

But then, the fact that he had the suspicion, ex-boyfriend out of the blue, sends a text with the suspicion, L is making jokes about a poisoning.

Damn, maybe this did happen.

It's still not hard proof, but for Jake, it's as close as you could get.

As Justin pointed out, heroin is dangerous on its own, and the world of drugs is full of uncertainty.

To dig deeper, I reached out to toxicologist Dr.

Ann Chappelle.

I wanted to know what substances are commonly used to lease drugs.

Could Jake have been exposed to an entirely different toxin that affected his brain in this way?

And beyond those three things that made Jake question the potential poisoning, the weird taste, the lack of sample brought into the hospital, and then the phone call, I wanted to rule out any other possibilities.

My name is Anne Chappelle.

I am a board-certified toxicologist with over 25 years of experience in the industrial chemical, pharmaceutical, consumer product industry.

I've done risk assessments, I've looked at labels.

I've helped people that live across the fence line.

I've interpreted data for CEOs, business people, you know, down to the downstream customer handling the material.

And so my job really is to take this wealth of information that we have out there and kind of assemble it, figure out what's right, what is good science, make sure it's transparent and translate it for the right audience member.

So I am employed by a consulting company, but I also have some side things that I like to do.

I co-host of Adverse Reactions, which is a podcast by the Society of Toxicology.

And I've also done some other things for like Wired magazine or other podcasts where they want somebody to help them understand

what is the intent or just provide some context for what may be happening and use some of the skills that I have and my resources to help people understand what we're talking about.

Perfect.

We don't have a sample of Jake's heroin, so it will be impossible to speak in definitives here, but Anne can help answer some of the questions around what could have happened to bring on his diagnosis.

Toxic leukoencephalopathy.

And in Jake's case, acute toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy.

It refers to damage to the brain white matter, and it manifests itself as neurotoxicity.

So what they've seen is that this tends to be more with females and people with liver insufficiencies.

The liver issues can be typical of a drug abuser.

We tend to think of the brain as being protected.

You have a skull, and we all have this thing called a blood-brain barrier, which is something that protects our brain from being exposed to a number of different agents.

So, when you have certain substances, we often see see that these agents that are really neurotoxic, very potent, those that can cross into the brain, those have been associated with TL formation.

The fact that Jakes came on very quickly and progressed very quickly without going through the typical stages that you might see is a little bit unique.

And a lot of times it's thought to be through a contaminant in the heroin.

Ann tells me about levosimol, originally created as an anti-parasitic drug for animals and humans, and now commonly used to cut into drugs like cocaine and sometimes heroin to increase the weight or volume of the drug.

This is an agent that has been associated with heroin-induced, chasing the dragon-induced TL.

I mean, first of all, a lot of drugs are bad anyway, and you don't know what you're getting, but we've all heard of rat poison.

Rat poison has been used to cut different drugs.

We also have xylosine, trank, that enhances like sedation effects, but it can cause a lot of wounds and tissue damage when used.

Even baking soda, starches, and sugars, those can be used, not usually having a lot of adverse effects with those.

But again, anytime you change a particular route of exposure, you've got an issue.

So, for example, if you are inhaling baking soda, people think, oh, well, baking soda is safe.

Well, it's safe when you ingest it in certain quantities.

It's safe when you make a cake with it or put it in the back of your fridge to absorb odors.

But it isn't necessarily safe when you ingest part of it as a result of it being contaminated into your heroin.

I think the point is that when you get a drug like heroin and you inhale it, you don't know what you're getting.

So the fact that you are inhaling something right through the lungs into the bloodstream going straight to the brain, it is a very, I guess, effective delivery method because you avoid the stomach breaking things down.

Because when you ingest something, you ingest it, it goes into your stomach, the acid in your stomach tends to break things down.

And then as it's absorbed, it goes through the liver, which the purpose of the liver is to detoxify drugs and get them ready to be eliminated.

So by inhaling these drugs, you're able to bypass some of those other processes.

And again, it's a very effective way to deliver substances, especially something that has been cut into the heroin that you're taking, right to the brain.

And if it already has the possibility to cross the blood-brain barrier or is known to cause problems, neurotoxic-type problems, it can promote those.

And here's where there's a bit of a chicken or the egg situation.

Did Jake's inhalation of heroin and potential toxic contaminants over time lead to this diagnosis?

Or was this specific cut of this specific batch laced with something that brought on this disease?

There could have been something

that he didn't realize because he was high

that mimicked TL early.

And then maybe that dose and whatever it was in it or not in it kind of just pushed him over the edge.

So it is kind of impossible to be able to tell.

The other thing to remember is that humans as a whole have a very diverse way of responding to odors and tastes.

Some people are super tasters or super smellers, some people are not.

The older you get, the less you're generally able to have functioning neurons in your nose that help facilitate the detection of odors.

So it really depends on a lot of factors.

Anne is insinuating here that because of Jake's particular response to odors or tastes, or even as an early sign of toxic glucoencephalopathy, Jake may have thought his stash tasted different, even when others did not.

Which is true, he did, and others noticed no difference.

However, this isn't entirely applicable for Jake's case, as he did taste other cuts from the same batch that were in the possession of other people and found no odd taste as he did in his own cut.

Oftentimes, when we think of contaminants or cutting agents and drugs, we think of things like fentanyl or rat poison.

But Anne brought up something else.

Baking soda, a common item that you can find in most homes.

And I was curious about this.

What everyday substances could Jake have been exposed to, or could have found its way into his heroin that could cause some serious harm when unintentionally inhaled?

The route of exposure can be really important.

Several years ago, there was a popcorn factory in Texas, and this popcorn factory made those microwave popcorn bags.

And so they made all different kinds of popcorn.

And one of the kinds was the theater butter type popcorn.

You know, everything's going fine.

The public loves this popcorn.

But as it turns out, some of the lab workers started to get sick with lung-related diseases.

And what was happening is that these lab workers, they were in quality control.

So they go down to the line and they'd have to pick maybe 15 or 20 bags off of the line, take them back to the lab, make microwave popcorn, open them up, pour them out, and count how many unpopped kernels there was.

Because there's a standard in the industry that says, you know, for good quality, if your popcorn pops and you only get two kernels, bad batch.

These workers, when they would open the bag, there would be a puff of the butter flavor.

And as it turns out, that substance, diacetal, was severely damaging their lungs to the point where some of them needed lung transplants and resulting in permanent damage.

So this idea that, hey, wait, diacetal is generally recognized as safe for its use as a butter flavor, yes, if you eat it.

But these lab workers were being exposed to really high levels and inhaling diacetal right into their lungs.

So why is this important in today's society?

Well, there's an awful lot of vaping materials that smell like bubblegum, or maybe they smell like buttered popcorn or mint or whatever cotton candy you want it to smell like.

And they say, oh, I can put these substances in there because, look, they're safe.

You know, I can eat them in my cotton candy.

I can put them on my popcorn.

But when you deliver them by an alternate route, that's when you have to be really careful.

There are some common substances that become lethal even in small amounts.

And a good example is the substance Visine.

Visine is an eye drop that you put when your eyes are really red, and it causes blood vessel constriction.

The blood vessels constrict in your eye, and they don't turn, your eye doesn't seem as red.

So when it's used as directed, it's fine.

But what swallowing it in copious amounts can cause a very serious adverse reaction.

If you get enough of it in you, it swallows enough, you can affect your central nervous system.

And if you swallow too much of the substance, you can get severe drowsiness, sedation.

So, it kind of looks maybe like alcohol intoxication.

It can

change your breathing, lower your blood pressure, and you can result in respiratory failure, or in severe cases, blurred vision, seizures, or even coma.

So, yes, there are substances that you might have in your home that you really have to be careful with and make sure that you use as directed in the route that you're supposed to.

When we start going back to Jake's situation, here he was inhaling something that was damaging his lungs, which partially might have been damaging his blood-brain barrier, and it could have resulted in something seemingly innocuous added to his drug, which maybe taken orally or injected would have been handled differently by the body.

But because it was inhaled, maybe that's one of the substances that kind of pushed him over the edge with TL.

Ann tells me the most common poisonings are food poisonings.

And while Jake didn't have food poisoning, I wondered about his career as an executive chef.

He was working in a kitchen most days.

Could he have been exposed to something there that, when coupled with his heroin use, resulted in this disease?

The state of California has decided that exposure to the combustion products from gas stoves is a problem for individuals and for the environment.

So they are limiting the amount of gas stoves that can be used in California.

You know, wherever Jake was working, if he was around a grill, if there were some open flames and those different combustion products those could have potentially led to something but if he was working in a restaurant where there's a lot of you know different foods and presumably sourced correctly i wouldn't think that's quite as much of an of an issue

if you have a lot of stress that can affect the functioning of your immune system, which your immune system is there to help ward off infection and to be able to protect you, you know, taking other illicit substances, chronic sleep deprivation, all those kinds of agents can subtly damage your immune system and make you more susceptible to a particular disease than maybe others.

So

if he was in a situation as a chef, working crazy hours, working a lot of nights, not being out during the day to get your healthy vitamin D, it could have depressed his immune system and made him potentially more susceptible.

But in reality, trying to, you know, put your finger right on something that might have caused this for him,

it's hard to tell.

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Now, I wanted to present a hypothetical.

Let's pretend a sample of Jake's heroin had been brought into the hospital for testing.

What sort of process is needed to find a potentially lethal toxin?

Or would Jake's symptoms and heroin use be enough for medical teams to say, hey, he was a drug user, and that's enough of an answer for us.

No need for a full-on criminal investigation.

If you like mystery thrillers, you know, the Pierot, Angela Lansberry, Agatha Christie, There's a whole plethora of items that have been used as poisons over the years.

And sometimes they will have a strange taste to them.

For example, arsenic has a certain taste of like almonds, cyanide as well.

So sometimes there may be some kind of evidence, like you maybe tasted something that was a little different.

So certain poisons can mimic common illnesses, making them very difficult to detect.

Things like heart attacks, strokes, infections, neurological disorders, all of those kinds of things could be associated with some kind of poisoning type event, some kind of adverse reaction to that.

For example, carbon monoxide poisoning, that tends to mimic a flu, sometimes a stroke.

Overexposure to thallium can mimic neurological diseases such as MS or Gilliam-Barr syndrome.

Cyanide, mimicking heart attack seizures.

So I think it's about us being kind of in tune with your own body and what feels right and what doesn't feel right.

Jake recalls a conversation with a medical professional who said it could be laced with something he'd never suspect, like a pesticide.

Certain insecticides can cause nerve damage, seizures, and coma.

But usually with those, they can do a blood test and see, you know, maybe that your levels of this particular enzyme are impaired.

But again, it's hard to figure this out.

The other thing is that, I mean, I'm addicted to procedural medical dramas and tox screen and CMC and blood and blah, blah, blah.

But that's for the common stuff.

Like they're looking for the tox screen.

They're looking for things like fentanyl and opioids and, you know, maybe some of these other agents that are commonly associated with an overdose.

So it's not until there is a specific request or an indication and you actually have the samples to be able to say, no, I really need, you know, I need to look for X.

And that's one of the reasons why whenever there is a suspicious death, it can take weeks and weeks for

the tox screens to come back.

Because again, these are not necessarily common toxins that they're looking for.

So it can be a little difficult.

And you have to be persistent.

Things like metals can accumulate in hair and bone.

Other agents you can look at like warfarin, which is a blood thinner that's commonly found in rat poison.

So they can commonly see, they can see that one pretty quickly.

But some of these others, they'd really have to know what they're looking for.

And that's the problem with some of these agents.

You have to be a detective sometimes to really say, okay,

what is it that might have caused the presentation of certain adverse effects.

Would they have been able to search for all of these potential toxins if Jake and his family had been able to provide a sample?

Or would they have simply tested for the basics?

There would have been no reason necessarily to do it.

Again, if he got this and then there were four or five other reports of overdoses or the same kind of symptoms presenting in a cluster in that particular area, there would have been no need, no reason to do that.

Again,

it can be very frustrating.

And I think, you know, I don't know a lot about Jake, but the idea that we would treat certain classes of people, a drug addict, a historically overweight person, make assumptions about their health, make assumptions about where they are in their medical journey or in their personal journey.

I think that dictates a lot of care across the U.S.

So it's not necessarily unexpected.

Now, if you think that you were drugged or poisoned, you know, keep what you can, pee in a clean glass jar, store that in a cool, dark place, and really work to create a timeline over several days.

Again, this idea of what did you eat when and where?

What were you doing at the time?

Everything you can remember for the last week.

So this idea of advocating for yourself.

And it sounds like Jake is really trying to do that and figure it out.

Unfortunately, you know, there could have been a whole multitude of things in his case.

And he could have just been on the brink of having an episode.

And whatever he took took him over, took him over the edge.

But it does make for an interesting question.

I think our culture today, we always want to know why.

So either we don't repeat it or we help other people.

You know, people that are ill, you know,

why me?

Is it in my genes?

What did I do wrong?

And it sometimes just isn't that simple, as much as we want to know the answer.

We may never get the answers Jake's been searching for, and he may never get them either.

All he's left with are theories, and now a growing sense of concern, concern for the ex-boyfriend.

Jake has tried to follow up, to check in, but every attempt has gone unanswered.

And with each passing day, Jake's concern only deepens.

So my theory is

they got back together

because

I get a text, same Facebook account from Facebook profile.

Elle.

Do you want to read this?

It was sent June 7th, 2022 at 6.50 p.m.

I won't share this entire exchange, but Ellen was kind, complimenting Jake on his sobriety and his journey of sharing his story, and then asking him to be mindful in what he shares with her ex-boyfriend as he was also working towards sobriety.

Over the span of nine days, there were three messages sent asking if Jake had heard from this man, all of which Jake read but left unanswered.

I think she was doing damage to his role.

I don't know if he was going to kill himself and made it to sound like drove that car down a cliff.

I don't know if they got back together.

I really don't know.

But what I do think I know is that she is aware what was said to me.

I do find the timing of this to be quite interesting.

Jake hadn't directly heard from her in two years.

I say directly because Jake had suspicions about a few burner accounts on social media, but otherwise it had been pretty quiet.

And now she's reaching out under the guise of potentially shepherding an addict towards sobriety?

I first started recording Jake's story a few years ago, and this phone call happened in the middle of it.

Just like Justin, I too started to wonder if this wild theory actually held weight.

And there was something else Jake had told me that I wasn't intending to include in this series, but now,

with everything else that has been shared, it may be worth looking into.

Back in 2020, when Jake was lying in bed dictating his story through letterboards or via his stepdad Eli, he ruminated on everything that had occurred and a question popped into his mind.

He went to Google and searched Munchhausen's, selected one of the first results, and filled out the intake form.

Not long after, Jake received a concerned email.

Was he safe?

Thank you for listening to Blank.

This podcast is hosted and produced by me, Corinne Vienne, alongside my co-creator and survivor, Jake Handel.

Our original music is composed by the brilliant and talented Michael Margay.

We're so grateful for your support.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider rating, reviewing, and sharing this story with others.

For additional resources, updates, and behind-the-scenes content, visit our website, blankthepodcast.com.

Blink will return with a new episode next Sunday.

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