Every time she went to church, Catherine was aware of the Radium Dial studio just across the road. It was a much quieter place these days; the economic downturn had the little town of Ottawa firmly in its grip – tenaciously so, in fact, as Illinois was such a big farming state. Many dial-painters had been laid off. Those who remained no longer lip-pointed; perhaps because of the Eben Byers case. Some were using their fingers instead; this doubled the amount of paint each woman handled. But given the financial hardships, the workers would paint any way they could: those lucky enough to have a job were fiercely loyal to the firm. There was a feeling that the whole town needed to support such an employer; there were very few of them about in these straitened times.
Though most of the original girls had been laid off or quit, their friendships had not faded. Catherine’s close neighbours included Marie Rossiter and Charlotte Purcell; they often spent time together and, when they met, they talked. They talked of Catherine’s tender jaw; of Charlotte’s achy elbow; of Marie’s sore legs. Marie and Charlotte had also gone to various doctors. And as the women discussed what the different physicians had said, they realised they’d all had the same response. And it wasn’t just them: Mary Robinson’s mother said the doctors ‘scoffed’ when she mentioned radium poisoning as a possible cause of her daughter’s disease.
As had happened in Orange, mysterious illnesses were plaguing the girls of Ottawa – but here there was no Dr Martland making pioneering medical discoveries; not even a Dr Barry who was familiar with phossy jaw. The conditions the girls were experiencing were completely novel in this town.
Although . . . there had been that visit from the national investigator Swen Kjaer. He had visited the local dentists and doctors – and he had visited not once, but twice. He had told them what he was looking for; described the tell-tale signs of radium poisoning. Yet the doctors do not seem to have joined the dots, nor notified the Bureau of Labor Statistics of these curious cases, as they had once promised to do.
An oversight? Or was it as some of the women were now starting to fear: that ‘none of the local physicians will admit it’. One dial-painter’s relative thought so: ‘They didn’t want anything to happen to the company,’ he said.
‘They were all bought off,’ claimed another.
‘It was confusing,’ remembered Catherine’s niece Mary. ‘I only remember that no one seemed to know what was wrong. But we knew something was wrong; really wrong.’
42
Charlotte Purcell heaved the bags of groceries into her arms and set off home. She was already thinking of how many meals she could eke from the food she’d bought. Times were tough, and everybody was tightening their belts.
The newspapers were full of more bad news in that February of 1934: the country was experiencing the worst-ever drought in its history. For Charlotte and Al, who now had three kids to feed, it was a precarious situation. Charlotte paused on her way home to rest, rubbing cautiously at her left arm. It had begun to bother her last year, but now there was a continuous achy pain. ‘The local doctors told her to use hot towels,’ recalled her husband, Al.
Hot towels, however, had had zero effect. Charlotte concentrated on her fingertips, running them gently over her arm. Yes, she thought, it was definitely bigger. She peered closely at the little swelling nestled in the crook of her elbow. It was just a little bump, but it seemed to her it was growing larger. She would show it to Al later, she thought, see what he had to say.
Suddenly, Charlotte cried out in pain. The bag in her left arm dropped fast to the floor, spewing groceries onto the sidewalk. She had felt a ‘sharp, knife-like pain which went through the elbow’. She bit her lip, rubbing again at where the pain was, and then bent to clear up her shopping. This was happening more and more frequently; when holding something it would drop out of her hands. It was the last thing she needed. The kids were four, three and a year-and-a-half old. She needed to get well.
Maybe prayer would help. That Sunday, she slid into her pew at St Columba with her usual piousness and bent her head to pray. There was a bit of a commotion further ahead, and Charlotte glanced up to see Catherine struggling; at that time her friend’s legs had been stiffening so she had trouble kneeling in church. Catherine could barely bend her legs on the solid wooden plank in the pews. Tom had his arms around her, trying to help her; he looked alarmed at his wife’s condition.
In fact, Tom found himself ‘in a frenzy of anxiety’. Catherine was still just about able to kneel and get around, but some days it was a close-run thing. She kept saying that they didn’t have the money to get better medical care, but Tom now decided something had to be done. Catherine owned their house outright, after all. They could always mortgage it; that would free up some cash for doctors’ bills.
Tom helped his wife slowly back to her feet. She was panting from the effort, blowing out little pained breaths as she tried to force her limbs to straighten. Yes, this had gone on too long. If the doctors in Ottawa wouldn’t help, Tom was determined to find somebody who would.
He went to Chicago, the nearest city. It was 85 miles away, but Tom travelled 85 miles there and 85 miles back – and he brought a doctor back with him: Charles Loffler. A ‘reputable medical man’ and blood specialist, Loffler was kindly-looking with sticky-out ears. He first saw Catherine at the Ottawa office where she worked on 10 March 1934. Despite his experience, he was initially flummoxed by her symptoms but adamant he would learn the cause. He took a blood specimen and, on testing it in Chicago, noticed ‘a toxic quality in her blood’.
The following Saturday, he returned to Ottawa – and found Catherine had declined significantly in the intervening week. She became so ill that just at the time her doctors’ bills soared – Loffler’s invoice, by the end of it, would be for some $605 ($10,701) – she was forced to leave work. Loffler did what he could to alleviate her anaemia and increasing pain, while he continued to hunt for a diagnosis.
The lump in Charlotte Purcell’s elbow, meanwhile, had now swollen to the size of a golf ball. She had ‘terrible pain’ all down her arm; it was worse at night, when she’d lie awake, scared and confused. She and Al also went to Chicago, like their neighbour Tom Donohue, but found ‘fifteen Chicago specialists were puzzled by her case’.
Catherine told her friend about Dr Loffler, so the next time he was in Ottawa, Charlotte also went to him for treatment – and it seems she persuaded many of her former colleagues to do the same. ‘She got them together,’ remarked a relative. ‘She was kind of pushy about it.’ The girls had been a clique at work and those who were left alive had not forgotten the bonds of their sisterhood. In the end, Loffler hosted several informal clinics for the women at a local hotel.