فصل 44

کتاب: دختران رادیوم / فصل 45

فصل 44

توضیح مختصر

  • زمان مطالعه 0 دقیقه
  • سطح خیلی سخت

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

این فصل را می‌توانید به بهترین شکل و با امکانات عالی در اپلیکیشن «زیبوک» بخوانید

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

فایل صوتی

برای دسترسی به این محتوا بایستی اپلیکیشن زبانشناس را نصب کنید.

متن انگلیسی فصل

44

Catherine’s treatment from Dr. Loffler stopped immediately. There would be no more injections for her severe anemia and no more pain-killing sedatives; they might hurt the baby. There was absolutely no question of a termination. Catherine and Tom were devout Catholics and would never have considered it. This child was a blessing from God.

Catherine continued to consult Loffler, however; he was the only physician she could trust. He was very expensive, though. The mounting doctors’ bills became too much for her husband, though Tom tried not to let that show.

As people in the local area surrounding Ottawa came to learn of the dial-painters’ lawsuit, censure of their actions heightened. Yet for every citizen disapproving of the news, there were women for whom the gossip brought the most enormous sense of relief, for it provided a solution to a long-unanswered question.

“It came to my attention,” wrote Pearl Payne, “that girls who had formerly worked at the Radium Dial were dying prematurely and of mysterious causes. I began to put two and two together… I then came to the conclusion that I had radium poisoning.”1

Pearl had dial-painted for only eight months, in the early 1920s. She didn’t live in Ottawa but LaSalle, some thirteen miles down the road: a fair distance if you didn’t have a car, which most people did not in the 1930s. Pearl had left Radium Dial to nurse her mother, and then focused on having a large family with her husband Hobart. She’d been thrilled when they’d had their first child, Pearl Charlotte, in 1928.

But to Pearl’s despair, it had all gone wrong the following year. She began staggering when she walked and was sick throughout 1929. In 1930, she underwent an abdominal operation to remove a tumor; afterwards, her head swelled to twice its normal size—and it did not go down. “There were big black knots behind her ears,”2 recalled her husband. A specialist was summoned. He cut Pearl’s ears inside and out “for drainage’3; the cuts had to be opened up every few days. Though it eventually reduced the swelling, said Pearl, “one side of my face was paralyzed.”4 In time, this paralysis left her—but then another problem began.

Pearl started bleeding continuously, down below. Another tumor was removed and a “curettement”5 of the womb performed, which meant a scraping out of tissue. Yet it didn’t help. The next time she bled, she bled for eighty-seven days straight. “During this time,” she remembered, “the doctor was perplexed and said I must have had a miscarriage.”6 He persisted in this argument as Pearl, again and again, bled and endured yet another curettement. “I knew this was not so,” Pearl cried in frustration at the doctor’s diagnosis, “because nothing had been done to cause me to be pregnant.”7 Instead, the problem seemed to be the tumors growing inside her—growing where her children should have been.

Her condition was serious. She endured “five years of continual doctoring, six operations and nine trips in all to the hospital.”8 At one stage, she had been moved to write to Hobart from her deathbed, believing the end was near. “Dearest Sweetheart,” she wrote:

I love you, and am laying here thinking of you and wishing I was in your dear arms. I am afraid I was very impatient with you for some time and I am heartily sorry. Please forgive me, as I have been very nervous and ill for a long time. Beneath it all I have loved you very deeply and dearly.

Pray for me daily that I may get well perfectly. If not, do not grieve, as we must bow our heads to the Lord’s will… Be good to our baby girl, teach her to love and remember me, and above all to be a good, virtuous girl.

Tell her I loved her dearly.9

The emotional pressure was unbearable. Pearl never knew if today would be her last; in time, her sickness affected both her body and her mind. “I am unable to enjoy life as a normal woman should,”10 she wrote dully.

The doctors told her she “belonged to a class of women of which the medical profession does not know the reason for their illness.”11 She was treated for malaria, anemia, and other conditions. The doctors’ guesses were especially frustrating for Pearl because she had been trained as a nurse: she knew none of the theories was right, but she was at a loss as to what could be the true cause.

By the April of 1933, Pearl had become desperate. “I notified my doctor [of more bleeding],” she remembered, “and he advised the removal of the uterus. I refused and lay in bed for several days debating what to do.”12 A hysterectomy: it would mean the end of her dreams for more children. No, she thought, no, not yet. She needed more time; more hope.

She called in other doctors, had other treatment, hoping for a different outcome. But it was all to no avail. “[In] July 1933,” she wrote numbly, “I was completely sterilized.”13

Pearl was heartbroken. “I was attacked by severe heart and sinking spells,”14 she recalled. As she read of the radium-poisoning cases in Ottawa, she grasped that her devastating condition might prove fatal—but at least she had an explanation.

“I believed,” she wrote of her case, “that radium had attached to the tissue of certain organs, causing them to be destroyed through tumorous growth.”15

She decided to get in touch with her old friend Catherine Donohue. The two women, who were very similar in nature, now became extremely close. Not long after, Pearl joined the fight for justice. The lawsuit was gaining momentum; the women were gaining friends.

In Chicago, however, Joseph Kelly, president of Radium Dial, was finding the opposite. By October 1934, perhaps in light of the lawsuits, he had clean run out of friends in his company. An executive called William Ganley wrested control of Radium Dial, and Kelly and his associates were voted out. “There were very hard feelings,” recalled one company officer, “because of the corporate shenanigans that went on.”16

But, Kelly had decided, he was not finished with Ottawa. Every current dial-painter at Radium Dial now received a letter. Mr. Turner—a manager at the plant under Mr. Reed—invited them all to a restaurant, where they were fed while he talked to them. He had an announcement—a new dial-painting business was going to be opening in town—and he had a question: how about you highly skilled girls join us at Luminous Processes?

It seems the women weren’t told it would be run by Joseph Kelly and Rufus Fordyce, who’d had charge of Radium Dial during the radium-poisoning scandal. They were told something extraordinary though. Mr. Turner “informed them that earlier dial-painters had died because they put brushes in their mouths, and since brush-licking was no longer permitted, exposure to radium would not be harmful.”17 It was an admission of guilt, but the original dial-painters never got to hear of it.

The new studio opened just a few blocks over from Radium Dial in a two-story redbrick warehouse. Thanks to the clandestine meeting in the restaurant, most of the dial-painters moved across, thinking the new operation safe. They applied paint using handheld sponges and wooden spatulas, using fingers to smooth it over, and wore thin cotton smocks to give them some protection from the dust.

Not every worker went, however. Mr. Reed stayed on as superintendent of the old firm. Loyal to the end, he and Mrs. Reed stuck with the company that had made them. They faced “a fiercely competitive situation,”18 for Radium Dial now competed directly with Joseph Kelly’s new business in the same small town.

Just down the road from this battle of big business, however, Catherine Donohue cared not a jot for the corporate infighting going on that fall. All that mattered to her was the tiny little girl she was cradling in her arms. She and Tom named their daughter Mary Jane, after Tom’s mother. “We always called her Mary Jane,” remarked her cousin. “Never Mary. Just Mary Jane.”19

Catherine Donohue vowed that she would make her daughter proud.

مشارکت کنندگان در این صفحه

تا کنون فردی در بازسازی این صفحه مشارکت نداشته است.

🖊 شما نیز می‌توانید برای مشارکت در ترجمه‌ی این صفحه یا اصلاح متن انگلیسی، به این لینک مراجعه بفرمایید.