As the year drew towards its end, Catherine’s isolation became even more intense. She now spent ‘nearly all of her days and nights lying down, venturing outside only with help, generally that of her husband’. ‘He used to carry her around in his arms,’ recalled James.
In such a condition, there was no way she could mother her children as she wanted or needed to. Although the Donohues had no money, a housekeeper was arranged; this live-in nanny, Eleanor Taylor, now became a surrogate mother to Tommy and Mary Jane. Catherine tried to direct her children’s care from bed.
‘I think it made her feel so sad that she couldn’t take care of her baby girl,’ commented her niece Mary. ‘She had been able to somewhat take care of the boy, and so he got to really have a mother’s love. It was just a very sad situation, it really was.’
It wasn’t even simply Catherine’s health that now kept her from the kids. Mary Jane was still very small, and her mother worried desperately that the glow she gave off in the dark was harming her baby. ‘They were almost afraid,’ remembered Mary, ‘to have Mary Jane interact with her mother. They really didn’t quite understand the radium sickness [and what it might do]. That was the sad part.’
‘I suffer so much pain,’ Catherine wrote to Pearl, and she may not simply have meant her aching hip and jaw, ‘that at times I feel my life was pretty hard to bear.’
Stuck on her own in bed all day, Catherine was incredibly lonely. Charlotte now lived in Chicago; Pearl lived miles away in LaSalle. Though the girls wrote to each other, it wasn’t the same. Catherine exclaimed in a letter to Pearl that December: ‘I have so much to say, one cannot give it all on paper.’ Her loneliness leapt off the page: ‘It has indeed been a long time since I have heard or seen any of you girls that it seems like writing to a stranger. I only wished we lived nearer one another.’ Still, at least she could be honest with them: ‘As to my health,’ she wrote bluntly, ‘I am still a cripple.’
Her isolation meant she had no idea what was happening in the court case. ‘We have not heard from Grossman ourselves and I can’t understand,’ Catherine wrote to Pearl. ‘Tom is not working now or I would call him long-distance and find out if he is coming down. Seems funny he has not written, doesn’t it?’
But Grossman had been too busy to write. ‘This is the first of the Radium Dial cases,’ he later said, ‘and I can leave no stone unturned in reaching for all the light and truth and all the facts of record.’ He did, however, drop the girls a festive card ‘with every good wish for a Happy Holiday Season’.
And Catherine took his advice to make that Christmas a happy one. Though Tom was still unemployed, she wrote in upbeat words to Pearl: ‘It makes it bad around Christmas, but one mustn’t complain.’ When Father Griffin visited to give her Holy Communion, Catherine sent a little prayer up to God to give thanks for all her blessings. She and Tom and Tommy and Mary Jane might be poor, and Catherine might be sick, but they were together at Christmas, and that was something for which she was simply very, very grateful.
The New Year, 1938, was all about preparing for the trial. The court date was set for 10 February, six days after Catherine’s thirty-fifth birthday. Grossman was as busy as ever, and now spending more time in Ottawa as he prepared the women for their testimonies. Since it was wintertime and Illinois weather could be fierce, on occasion he had to pull out all the stops to make it there. ‘They went back and forth,’ recalled his son Len. ‘I know one time the roads were bad so he rented a private plane and somebody flew him down there [in] a two-seater or four-seater plane.’ It was a typically flamboyant Grossman gesture.
The day after Catherine’s birthday, she and Tom struggled to make what was now an extremely laborious journey to Chicago for examinations by three physicians: Dr Loffler, Dr Dalitsch (a specialist dentist) and Dr Weiner; the latter took X-rays of her radium-filled bones. This trio of doctors had agreed to testify in court, and they would base their testimony on the exams.
They were shocked as Catherine staggered into their offices that Saturday morning. She was, Sidney Weiner recalled, ‘a woman appearing much older than her given age and walking with the assistance of two people; markedly emaciated; with an ash colour [face]’. She had no fat on her body at all. Unable to eat – for it was too painful to do so – the weight simply fell off her frame and left her skeletal beneath her loose dresses. Catherine knew she had lost weight. But even she was shocked when she stepped on the doctor’s scales; she weighed 71 pounds (5 stone).
From his dental examination, Dalitsch found the ‘destruction’ of Catherine’s mouth went ‘right through the body of the lower jawbones’. These fractures had led to ‘displacement of the fragments’ – which was why Catherine kept having to pick out pieces of her jawbone from her mouth. There was also, Dalitsch noted, ‘considerable discharge of pus and foul odour’.
Loffler, meanwhile, ran tests on her blood, finding ‘an alarming loss of blood powers’. He discovered that she had a white blood cell count of only a few hundred, whereas normal levels are about 8,000. She is, he thought to himself, ‘near death from exhaustion caused by the lack of these [cells]’.
Yet it was her X-rays that troubled the doctors most. The hard tumour on her hipbone, which had so been concerning Catherine over the past few months, was now ‘about the size of a grapefruit’.
The doctors didn’t share their findings with the Donohues. Catherine was a sick woman; she needed to get home to bed. Just as Irene La Porte’s doctor had felt, the physicians did not believe it was right to share their prognosis with Catherine, for fear of accelerating her decline. Far better that she stayed hopeful and positive: that, the doctors believed, would help her fight this disease far more than knowing the facts.
Catherine and Tom made the difficult journey back to East Superior Street. Tom carried his wife into the front room and laid her gently down on the bed. She needed to rest. For in five days’ time, she would have her day in court. Catherine Wolfe Donohue was holding Radium Dial to account for what it had done to her and her friends – and she was determined, no matter what, to make a difference.
50
Thursday 10 February 1938 dawned as a cool and cloudy day. In the front room of East Superior Street, Tom Donohue helped his wife to dress. He helped her slide on her knee-high nude stockings; lace her flat black shoes. Catherine had picked out her best outfit: once again the black dress with white polka dots slipped over her head and she slowly fastened its black belt around her emaciated waist. The dress hung so much more loosely than it had done in July when she’d first met Grossman, but she wasn’t going to think about that today.