Helen Munch attended; no longer married because, she said, her husband had divorced her because of her illness. She confessed her legs felt ‘hollow . . . as if air was rushing through’. Though she was a woman who ‘wanted to be going all the time’, she said miserably, ‘Now I have to be quiet, still. I never wanted to be quiet.’
Olive West Witt, a dark-haired motherly woman, was distraught. ‘I’ll tell you how I feel,’ she said. ‘I’m just thirty-six, but I live like an old woman of seventy-five.’ Inez Vallat also hobbled to the hotel; since last February one side of her face had drained constantly with pus, while her hips were now so locked that she was almost at the point that ‘she could move neither backward nor forward’. Marie Rossiter told the doctor how she ‘would love to dance, but I can’t because of my ankles and the bones of my legs’. Charlotte persuaded the Glacinski sisters, Frances and Marguerite, to come too. ‘Charlotte never felt sorry for herself,’ said a relative. ‘She would just take over and take care of [everyone].’
Though Loffler travelled to Ottawa every weekend throughout March and into April 1934, he was still not ready to present a diagnosis. Come 10 April, Charlotte could wait no longer. The growing mass in her arm was excruciating. ‘We finally took her to Chicago to Dr Marshall Davison,’ her husband, Al, remembered.
It was there, at the Cook County Hospital, that Dr Davison presented Charlotte with a choice. In order to live, he told her, there was only one option. He would have to amputate her arm.
Charlotte was twenty-eight years old; she had three children under five. Yet what choice did she have? She chose life.
They cut off her arm at the shoulder. ‘There was no way,’ a relative later said, ‘that they could use a prosthetic arm or a hook because they had nothing to attach it to.’ It was gone. Her limb, which had always been there, scratching her nose, carrying shopping, holding a watch dial, was gone. The doctors were mystified by the arm itself. With all the grim fascination of medics, after the operation they kept it in formaldehyde because it was so odd.
For the Purcells, there was simply a strange relief. ‘Dr Davison says we’re lucky to have her still with us,’ Al Purcell said quietly.
But his wife had been left ‘helpless’. Before the operation, she had slid from her left hand, for the last time, her wedding ring. Now, she wore it on her right hand, and asked Al to safety-pin her left sleeve to cover up the missing limb. ‘My husband,’ she later said, ‘is my hands.’
Charlotte and Al only hoped that such a huge sacrifice would be enough. But already it didn’t help with one thing: ‘She still feels,’ Al remarked, ‘the terrible pain of the hand and arm they removed.’ The ghost girl had phantom pains from the limb that was no longer there.
‘There is some possibility,’ Al added, ‘of recurrence on the right side. We’re not sure yet.’
Only time would tell.
43
It arrived by letter at 520 East Superior Street. A slim, unremarkable envelope addressed to Mr Thomas Donohue. It looked innocent enough, but the news it held was anything but.
Having run his tests, including X-rays on her jaw, Dr Loffler could now confirm it. Catherine Donohue was suffering from radium poisoning.
‘Tom was devastated,’ remembered his niece Mary. ‘Just absolutely devastated. I don’t know how the man functioned.’
‘After that,’ Tom himself said, ‘I took care of [Tommy] when [Catherine] could not do so.’
Catherine herself never spoke publicly about how she felt. She probably prayed, as did many of her fellow sufferers. ‘I firmly believe,’ wrote one of her friends, ‘that prayers is all that brought me through.’
Yet just days after Catherine and Tom had received that letter from Chicago, Catherine’s disease took even the solace of prayer away from her. On Wednesday 25 April 1934, she hobbled the short distance to St Columba – but found herself unable to kneel in church. Her hips had become so locked that she could no longer bend her legs to pray; for Catherine, so devout, it was profoundly distressing. At about the same time, Charlotte Purcell came home from hospital for ‘the first time with her arm off’. The doctors had confirmed radium was to blame for all of this – and Tom Donohue felt somebody should tell Radium Dial.
Ottawa was a small place. Mr and Mrs Reed, the firm’s superintendent and instructress, didn’t attend St Columba, but they were forever walking past it as they went to work.
‘I saw him on the street,’ remembered Tom of running into Reed. ‘I told him the women were in a bad way, and that the doctors were finding it was from the material in the paints they were using.’
But Mr Reed refused to admit any responsibility. He refused even after he saw Charlotte and her husband walking past the studio, where they met him coming down the steps. Al was ‘very angry’ at what had happened, but Mr Reed brushed off everything they said.
Dr Loffler tried to communicate with the firm too. Going above Mr Reed’s head, he telephoned Vice President Fordyce. ‘I told him from the cases I had seen, I thought it would be wise to investigate all the [other] cases.’
Loffler’s phone call was not unexpected to Rufus Fordyce. After all, the firm had in its possession the results of the radioactivity tests of all the women at Radium Dial, taken back in 1928. The results that showed that, of the sixty-seven girls tested that day, thirty-four were suspiciously or positively radioactive. Thirty-four women: more than half the workforce.
The company had said in its press statement at the time: ‘Nothing even approaching symptoms [of radium poisoning] has ever been found.’ That declaration was not some miscalculation, caused by a misunderstanding of the data. The data was clear: most of the employees were radioactive; a telltale sign of radium poisoning. But though the women’s breath betrayed the truth, the company had deliberately and unashamedly lied.
The company still had the women’s names on its secret list of results, each numbered according to how radioactive she was. Ranked at number one for positivity: Margaret Looney, Mary Tonielli . . . Marie Rossiter. ‘Very suspicious’ were the results of Catherine Wolfe and Helen Munch.
For almost six years Radium Dial had known the women were radioactive. Yet ‘the knowledge of the discoveries had been carefully concealed by the firm, who feared disruption of their business if the facts became known . . . the victims had not been informed of their condition, nor the cause, through fear of panic among the workers’.
It all meant that when Loffler’s call came in, Fordyce was ready. He refused to do anything.
Catherine, Charlotte and all the other girls, however, were determined to make the company pay. In many ways, they had no choice: Catherine had already expended large sums in a vain effort to be cured of the disease and she and Tom were stone-broke.