C
CatholicNerd
Guest
My good friend Mike called me last night shortly after I found out the news about problems with my own thyroid and said: “My doctor found something on my thyroid. They’re going to do an ultrasound tomorrow. They think it may be a result of growing up {where we did}.”
I’m not entirely sure why his doctor put it that way, and I can only imagine how much it’s freaking him out. We grew up in an area that was home to 9 plutonium producing reactors (the last of which was decommissioned in 1987), several enrichment facilities, a nuclear fuel processing plant, and a still operating civil reactor, *but *the DOE has constantly assured us that the only danger to people occurred in the early days of the site in the late 1940’s when the dangers of Iodine-131 were not understood and it was vented off into the wind. We’ve all been told that our cancer risk isn’t even above that of the general population of our state.
So I hope that his doctor wasn’t doing a bit of fear-mongering. The political lines are drawn pretty deeply up there, with some people screaming CANCER every time anybody mentions the cleanup and decontamination work going on out at the site.
At any rate, my friend really needs prayers, both for his thyroid and for his troubled mind.
I’m not entirely sure why his doctor put it that way, and I can only imagine how much it’s freaking him out. We grew up in an area that was home to 9 plutonium producing reactors (the last of which was decommissioned in 1987), several enrichment facilities, a nuclear fuel processing plant, and a still operating civil reactor, *but *the DOE has constantly assured us that the only danger to people occurred in the early days of the site in the late 1940’s when the dangers of Iodine-131 were not understood and it was vented off into the wind. We’ve all been told that our cancer risk isn’t even above that of the general population of our state.
So I hope that his doctor wasn’t doing a bit of fear-mongering. The political lines are drawn pretty deeply up there, with some people screaming CANCER every time anybody mentions the cleanup and decontamination work going on out at the site.
At any rate, my friend really needs prayers, both for his thyroid and for his troubled mind.
