Day after day, former colleagues and friends lined up to dismiss them. ‘Margaret Looney was one of the girls that appeared to [me] to look as if she had one foot in the grave when she was hired!’ exclaimed one Radium Dial worker bluntly. ‘The [girls] that people thought died from radium and looked so terrible looked terrible when they were hired.’
‘Some of them shun us as if we had the plague,’ remarked Catherine’s friend Olive Witt. Catherine lived just a few paces from Division Street in Ottawa and it was painfully apt, given the way the women had split the town – and the disapproval went right to the top, with ‘business interests, politicians and the clergy’ all against the women bringing suit.
In her little house on East Superior, however, Catherine ignored everything that was going on in the outside world. Her world, now, reduced down: down to the four walls of the clapboard house, down to the room she was standing in, down to the dress hanging on her body . . . down to her body itself. She stood quite still, as though listening. Then she felt it again.
She recognised that feeling. She knew what that was.
Catherine Wolfe Donohue was pregnant.
44
Catherine’s treatment from Dr Loffler stopped immediately. There would be no more injections for her severe anaemia 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.’
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 tumour; afterwards, her head swelled to twice its normal size – and it did not go down. ‘There were big black knots behind her ears,’ recalled her husband. A specialist was summoned. He cut Pearl’s ears inside and out ‘for drainage’; the cuts had to be opened up every few days. Though it eventually reduced the swelling, said Pearl, ‘one side of my face was paralysed’. In time, this paralysis left her – but then another problem began.
Pearl started bleeding continuously, down below. Another tumour was removed and a ‘curettement’ 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.’ 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.’ Instead, the problem seemed to be the tumours 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’. 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.
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,’ 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’. She was treated for malaria, anaemia 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.’ 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 sterilised.’
Pearl was heartbroken. ‘I was attacked by severe heart and sinking spells,’ 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.’
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.