فصل 37

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فصل 37

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37

ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

—1930—

Katherine Schaub placed her cane gingerly on the low step in front of her; she could now walk only with the aid of a cane or crutches. She had been forced to return to Newark: having spent large sums trying to regain her health, she was now entirely dependent on her $600 ($8,515) annuity, but it didn’t provide enough money for a rural residence. She hated being back in the city, where she felt her health declined.

She started up the low step, but slipped and came down hard upon her knee. It would have been painful for anyone, but Katherine was a radium girl: her bones were as fragile as china. She felt the bone fracture, but when Dr. Humphries examined her x-rays, he had worse news to tell her than the broken bone.

Katherine Schaub had a sarcoma of the knee.

She was admitted to hospital for ten long weeks, while they treated it with x-rays. It seemed to reduce the swelling, but Katherine was utterly demoralized. Encased in plaster for months, she was eventually told the bone “didn’t knit the way it should”1 and that, from now on, she would have to wear a metal brace. “A lump came into my throat,” Katherine recalled, “as the doctor fastened on my leg the strange contrivance… I cried a little bit, but my faith consoled me.”2

Despite the consolation of her faith, however, she found her prognosis profoundly depressing. That old cine-reel from years gone by started up again in her mind, now with an ever-growing cast of ghost girls. Where Katherine had once gained relief from being in the sunshine, now, she said, she was “having difficulty with the light and sun up here on the roof.”3 “My head,” she stammered, “had me full of fears—couldn’t tell if it was mental or real…I couldn’t stand the light in my eyes; was a wreck by 4 p.m.”4 Perhaps all this was why she began to develop what she called “this craving of alcohol of mine.”5

The committee of doctors was, as ever, on hand to help, but Katherine now refused the treatments Ewing and Craver suggested. “They say you do not know a person,” she wrote assertively, “until you have lived with them. I have lived with radium ten years now and I think I ought to know a little bit about it. So far as [the suggested] treatment, I think it’s all bosh.”6 She would not kowtow to their demands.

Ewing and Craver were mad about it—and not just Katherine’s stubbornness, but increasing boldness from all four remaining women. “Relations are far from satisfactory,” Krumbhaar wrote. “It is difficult to get them to come to see us and they will not accept our treatment.”7

Yet in standing up for themselves, the women were playing a dangerous game; the committee had control of the purse strings for their medical care. It wasn’t long before Grace was told she could no longer call on Dr. McCaffrey; the board also raised concerns about Dr. Humphries, writing: “It might be that, even though [Humphries] has the women’s confidence, it would be better, all things considered, for someone else to take care of them.”8

The company was “kicking”9 about every bill, yet the firm itself was in good financial health. Despite the Wall Street Crash, the use of luminous dials had not diminished, and the firm was also still supplying radium for the Radithor tonic and other medicines; the craze for these had continued, after a momentary dip when the girls’ stories first hit the headlines.

The year 1930 flowed fluidly into 1931. At the turn of the year, Katherine was still in hospital, though her tumor was shrinking thanks to Humphries’s attentions; it currently measured 45 centimeters. Come February, she was still unable to do much in the way of walking, but it seemed she had beaten the worst of it.

The spring of 1931 found Grace Fryer in good spirits too—partly because she had made a new friend at her hospital appointments. By chance, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was working on the floor above, and once in a while he would visit her. “My impression,” said Grace’s brother Art, who drove her to her appointments, “was that these occasional visits made her feel many times better, even if it was only for a short while. Seeing Grace’s spirits higher was perhaps one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever had.”10

Grace was still determined to be as positive as she could. It was true that she’d had to revert to wearing her brace, but she did not let it slow her down. “I work and I play and I ‘dance’ a bit,” she said. “I go motoring. I even swim—but I can stay in the water only two minutes at a time. I can’t leave the brace off my back any longer than that.”11

In the hospital in Orange, however, there were no such diversions for the latest patient who was now wheeled through its doors. Irene Corby La Porte, who had worked with Grace during the war, now followed her friends to Dr. Humphries’s office.

It was the summer of 1930 that she’d noticed something wrong. She and her husband Vincent, longing for a family—Irene had suffered three miscarriages by that time—had made love while they were staying in a cottage in Shark River Hills. But it didn’t feel right to Irene, inside. There was a swelling in her vagina, which interfered with intercourse.

Vincent took her to Dr. Humphries, who diagnosed a sarcoma, then about the size of a walnut. Despite the doctor’s efforts, her decline was swift. “Her whole leg and side began to swell rapidly and paralyzed her,” recalled her sister. “She was getting worse every minute.”12

Irene was admitted to hospital, but by March 1931 the doctors said there wasn’t very much they could do for her except try to relieve the pain. By then, the area around the top of her thigh had become four times as large, as the sarcoma grew unstoppably inside her. Doctors found that “a vaginal examination could hardly be made on account of the tumor blocking the entrance to the genitals”13; Irene had great difficulty urinating, and the pain was “terrific.”14

In April, they called in Dr. Martland. “I found a bedridden patient extremely emaciated and filled with a huge sarcoma,”15 he remembered. His diagnosis was immediate and absolute.

“He told me definitely,” remembered Vincent La Porte, choking up, “that she did [have radium poisoning] and she had about six weeks to live.”16

They did not tell Irene, wanting to spare her, though she was smart enough to know. “She was always saying, ‘I know I am dying from radium poisoning,’” remembered one of her physicians. “I convinced her she wasn’t; that she was going to get better. It is tact of a physician not to reveal a fatal prognosis.”17

Martland wasted no time enlightening the world about the evolution of radium’s MO. He had seen enough cases now to know that these latent sarcomas—which could leave a victim healthy for years after her exposure to radium, before coming horribly to life and taking over her body—were the new phase of this terrifying poisoning. He added: “When I first described this disease, there was a strong tendency among some of those interested in the production and therapeutic use of radium to place the entire blame on mesothorium… In the cases autopsied recently, the mesothorium has disappeared while the radium persists.”18 He could reach only one conclusion: “I am now of the opinion that the normal radioactivity of the human body should not be increased; [to do so] is dangerous.”19 It had to be, for each week another dial-painter presented another sarcoma, each in a new location—her spine, her leg, her knee, her hip, her eye…

Irene’s family couldn’t believe how fast she was fading from them. But she still had grit in her. On May 4, 1931, as she lay dying in hospital, she filed a claim for damages against USRC; she was willing to settle.

But the company was just about done with settlements. Now they had seen off Berry, they were not too concerned about the adversaries to follow.

Only a month later, after fighting such a hard, hard battle that she was destined never to win, Irene died on June 16, 1931. At the time of her death, Martland said her tumor had become “a huge growth.”20 So much so, he went on, that “you couldn’t take the whole mass out together without taking the woman apart. The whole mass was larger than two footballs.”21 That was how Irene La Porte died.

Her husband Vincent was filled with such a rage that he knew not what to do with himself. It was red hot at first, searing him with pain and grief, but as time went on it cooled into an icy, diamond-hard desire for vengeance. And Vincent La Porte would fight on for his wife. He would fight on through the courts—through 1931, and ’32, and ’33 and even beyond.

Irene La Porte’s case against USRC would be the one that finally led to a judgment for all the Orange girls. Vincent didn’t know it when he started, but that fight was going to take years yet. The company was in no rush.

Then again—neither was he.

Martland had one final statement to give on the sarcomas; on the insidious time bombs that he now knew were lurking inside any and all dial-painters who had ever once lifted a brush to their lips.

“I believe,” he said, “before we get through, the number will be appalling.”22

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