jeanna marraffa with the upstate new york poison control center.hinking, "could there be something terribly wrong with her vitamins and supplements and it be a contaminant in there?" and as those were quickly ruled out, then i didn't know the source. narrator: mary's symptoms were distinctive -- rapid organ failure, large-scale cell death throughout the body, cardiac arrest. [ flatlining ] it usually signifies that there's some kind of toxin in the body. narrator: doctors theorized about a possible culprit, a drug called "colchicine" that's normally used to treat gout. scotti: jeanna marraffa looked at all the symptoms, looked at the medical charts, and said, "i think you need to test for colchicine." marraffa: it's not very common. i've probably only had 15 colchicine cases in my career. narrator: colchicine works in ways similar to chemotherapy. it stops the normal process of cell division, which is good if you have something like gout. if you don't, it can be a problem. it's potentially very toxic, so it's used in very low doses and usually moni