The Plutonium Files (24 page)

Several years later, when Bassett wrote up his version of the experiment, the misdiagnosis that he mentioned was a reference to Eda. “A woman aged 49 years may have a greater life expectancy than originally anticipated due to an error in the provisional diagnosis,” he wrote.
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But it is not clear what Bassett meant by the “provisional diagnosis.” Although the doctors were uncertain about what was wrong with Eda, nowhere in her medical records is there a suggestion that she was terminally ill. Both Langham and Bassett knew Eda was not terminally ill at the time they were writing the Los Alamos report, but they omitted the fact from their published paper. The misinformation was hidden from Eda’s family, the scientific community, and the public until 1995.

Eda was not terminally ill, she was not chronically ill, and she may not even have been seriously ill. The shopping excursions certainly seem to suggest that her health was not badly impaired. Her daughter-in-law, Helen, never recalls Eda having hepatitis. And her son, Fred, said his mother seemed fine when he finally arrived home from the war. “I don’t remember her being sick at all after my father died.
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I lived with her for two years when I got home from the Navy,” he recalled.

The error proved to be a stroke of good fortune for the Manhattan Project doctors, however. Since Eda’s metabolism was normal, scientists would be able to get a more accurate picture of how a healthy worker metabolized and excreted plutonium. She was to become one of the most
intensely studied of the injectees. From 1945 until she died in a nursing home in 1983, she was tracked by doctors and scientists working for the Manhattan Project or its successor agencies. She was not told about the plutonium injection for nearly thirty years.

On July 25, 1946, eight months after she had been injected with plutonium, Eda fell down her basement stairs. She told doctors she didn’t recall striking her head or losing consciousness, but afterward she became dizzy and vomited. Blood trickled from her right ear and her spinal fluid was bloody. X rays revealed no evidence of an old or new fracture.

Eda was hospitalized for two weeks and complained frequently of a severe headache and upset stomach. Doctors settled on a diagnosis of cerebral concussion. The physical effects apparently caused by the injury plagued her the rest of her life. She suffered from severe attacks of vertigo, nausea, blurred vision, and unsteady gait. Eventually she learned to control the vertigo by first raising her head from the pillow in the morning before turning it from side to side. Dr. John Cobb, a medical doctor and radiation expert who reviewed Eda’s medical files, said it was unlikely that the plutonium contributed to the fall or the nausea and vertigo.

Bassett’s name does not show up in Eda’s chart during the July 1946 hospital visit because he was at Crossroads. But he was clearly behind her third admittance in October 1946 for “liver function” studies. “I am still hammering away at the Hp patients and now have Hp3 in again for about a week,” Bassett confided to Langham.
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“You should soon receive some urine specimens and I hope at least one four-day collection of feces.”

Eda’s red blood cells appeared to be within normal limits, but years later, another test would indicate the cells were of “very rare” shapes and sizes.
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The red blood cell changes—which can be indicators of numerous diseases, including anemia—could have been caused by the radiation from the plutonium.

In the spring of 1950, a few months before Bassett and Langham completed their work on the Los Alamos report, Langham asked the Rochester doctors to secure several additional urine samples from Eda and John Mousso. “Even one sample from one or two of these individuals after this late date,” Langham wrote, “will be extremely valuable data to have.
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It will afford a basis of checking mathematical expressions that we have derived and will give us some confidence in our extrapolations.”

Bassett, who by then had left Rochester and had gone to work in a Veteran’s Hospital in Los Angeles at Stafford Warren’s urging, enlisted the aid of Christine Waterhouse. A 1938 graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Waterhouse had earned her medical degree from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1942. She joined the staff of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1943 and remained in Rochester for the rest of her professional career.

Waterhouse was the young doctor who did the routine kidney test on Eda when she was hospitalized during the injection period. Her name also appears on the cover of the Los Alamos report as one of the fifteen doctors or scientists who did work related to the study. But Waterhouse has stated emphatically that she had nothing to do with the original injections. “I never knew the top people in this affair,” she said during one of several interviews.
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“This was already a done thing. The people making the decisions, I didn’t have much to do with. I was told to take care of the patients.”

Waterhouse examined Eda for the first time in 1950 at about the time the excretion samples were shipped to Los Alamos. It was the beginning of a patient-doctor relationship that continued until 1979. Waterhouse saw Eda sometimes as often as twice a month in the later years, listening to her heart, her lungs, the steady stream of her complaints. Yet, over the course of three decades and throughout the 300-plus pages of Eda’s medical records, Waterhouse never mentions the word “plutonium.”

Waterhouse said she did not refer to plutonium because the experiment was “classified information” until 1972.
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After that, she said she still didn’t mention it because she didn’t think any of Eda’s medical problems were related to the injection. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to put it in the chart unless I thought it was related to the symptoms,” she said.

Waterhouse said she took a practical view toward the experiment after the injections had been completed. “My feeling was once the initial act was done, then it was my job to get all the information I could get.
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In other words, there was no way anybody was going to take the plutonium back. As long as it’s there, you might as well, I felt, get the maximum amount of information that I could to try to help in the future.”

In October 1950 Langham asked former Manhattan Project doctor Joseph Howland, who by this time had rejoined the University of Rochester medical school, to help him obtain X rays of Eda and John Mousso. The “most likely symptoms” resulting from the injections, he said, would be changes in the bones—a generalized inflammation, thinning in the
bones of the feet, the jaw, and the heads of the long bones, and a coarsening of the trabeculae. “The X rays seem to be the all important thing, but please get them in a completely routine manner.
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Do not make the examination look unusual in any way.”

In April 1953 X rays again were taken of Eda’s elbows, hands, both feet, and ankles. “There are some interesting changes in the chest,” a radiologist noted.
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A “distinctly abnormal” mass, he added, had been detected on the left side of her rib cage. The radiologist’s findings were delivered to Waterhouse and to Louis Hempelmann, who had left Los Alamos in October of 1948 to become a professor of experimental radiology at the University of Rochester’s medical school. Hempelmann, in turn, relayed the information to Charles Dunham, a top AEC official in Washington, D.C.: “The patient in question was brought in for a skeletal survey, and turned out to have a ‘coin-like’ lesion inside the chest wall.…
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It is undoubtedly an incidental finding, but she must be explored by the chest surgeon here at Strong. In the course of the operation, he will remove a rib which we can analyze. Her films show the same type of minimal indefinite change in the bone the others have had.”

Eda was admitted to the hospital in June of 1953 for surgery. She was anesthetized and a four-inch incision made along her left side. A “soft, rubbery mass” on the third rib was removed as well as two inches of the rib itself.
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The mass turned out to be benign. Her medical records don’t indicate what became of the rib.

At about the time of the operation, Eda moved forty miles away to Canandaigua, a bucolic town on the shores of Canandaigua Lake, the “gem” of New York’s Finger Lakes. Settled soon after the end of the Revolutionary War, Canandaigua has a history long enough to give an antique patina to the entire town. Just blocks from the town center, sweeping lawns are anchored by carriage barns that once sheltered horses from snow. But the stately homes, the fresh wind blowing in off the lake, and the town’s lovely shoreline did little to improve her health. “I’m sick to my stomach all the time,” Eda complained when she was admitted to Strong Memorial Hospital in August 1962. It was her fourth admittance since the 1945 plutonium injection.

Her second husband, Howard, had died three months earlier and Eda was acutely depressed. She had lost ten pounds and was experiencing early-morning awakenings and feelings of despair. “Patient is a thin, anxious appearing female who looks somewhat younger than her stated age of 65,” one doctor observed.
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Month after month she complained of morning nausea, dizziness,
tension, and anxiety. She had many other odd symptoms as well. She frequently complained of a burning sensation on her lips and the tip of her tongue. She had spasms in her throat, severe pain on the side or top of her head, and a prickly sensation in her face. She went to countless dentists with complaints, but the doctors could find nothing wrong. It’s not clear whether the plutonium, which can be deposited around the tooth sockets and bone surfaces of the mouth, was causing her discomfort. But dogs injected with large amounts of the material have experienced loosening of the teeth and other dental problems.

In Canandaigua, Eda also began seeing Dr. Joseph Guattery, an internist who once taught at the University of Rochester medical school. Now retired, Guattery said that Christine Waterhouse referred Eda to him. “Because Mrs. Charlton lived in Canandaigua, it was much easier for somebody to give her regular daily care and whatnot here, so she referred her to me.”
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Helen Schultz, Eda’s daughter-in-law, said Eda told her that she first learned that she had been injected with plutonium from Guattery. Helen said she couldn’t remember the year her mother-in-law first mentioned it. “She said to me one day, ‘What is plutonium?’ and I told her.
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Then I said, ‘Where did you hear that?’ and she said, ‘Dr. Guattery said that’s what they gave me at Strong.’ ”

But Guattery said he didn’t inform Eda of the plutonium injection. Rather, Eda told him and then “Dr. Waterhouse gave me a little information,” Guattery said.
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“I can see her very plainly as you’re talking to me. She was a moderately stout woman, though not very fat. She was well-built, soft-spoken. She had dark skin, dark hair, wore glasses and didn’t always seem to have very much energy.”

Eda’s son and daughter-in-law also continued to take her to Rochester for her checkups at Dr. Waterhouse’s office. In the early years, Eda usually visited Waterhouse once a year. But as she grew older and sicker, the frequency of the visits increased. Waterhouse chronicled her complaints and ordered numerous tests—X rays, blood tests, barium enemas, liver and brain scans.

In early January 1967, after Eda’s weight had ballooned to 144 pounds, she confided to Waterhouse that she was afraid she had cancer “…   she feels that this weight increase is all localized in the abdominal area, in other words, she wonders if she has a tumor growing in her abdomen,” Waterhouse wrote.
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Dr. John Cobb said Eda’s fear of cancer could have been something that she picked up unconsciously from Waterhouse. “The doctor was
being very careful and not leaving any stone unturned.
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The patient could have been worried about cancer because her doctor was worried about cancer.”

But Waterhouse said she requested a lot of tests because Eda had so many symptoms. “Patients of this character who tend to have a lot of symptoms, you work them up and you don’t find anything to cause their symptoms and you tell them.
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They come back three months later with a different set of symptoms.”

According to Dr. Waterhouse’s notes, Eda mentioned “experimentation” to her during an October 18, 1975, office visit. This is the sole written proof that Eda had some idea she had been involved in an experiment. “Mrs. Charlton says she feels terribly from the mental point of view, that she is forgetting things and is confused much of the time.
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She again mentions the problem of experimentation but does not push this at the present,” Waterhouse wrote.

Eda’s physical and emotional problems seemed to accelerate in the 1970s. She felt plain terrible. She was chronically depressed and suffered from fatigue and shortness of breath. The morning nausea continued along with the discomfort in her bowels.

Her diet worsened. She lived on milk, crackers, and bread and subsequently developed anemia. “She fails to cook vegetables because it’s too much trouble and the same goes for meat,” Waterhouse jotted down after one visit.

Eda also began taking up to eight aspirin a day for the ever-increasing pain from her arthritis. New X rays showed bony outgrowths on each hip and other degenerative changes. The plutonium had delivered twice the amount of radiation to her bone cavities theoretically needed to induce a tumor. Roland Finston, a retired Stanford University health physicist, said it was quite possible her bones could well have developed a “moth-eaten” appearance from the radiation. But the arthritis didn’t worry Eda as much as cancer. Despite the negative tests, Dr. Water-house’s notes show that Eda continued to worry about a possible malignancy:

   • 1976 [Day illegible]: “The patient continues to be obsessed with the idea that she has received [illegible] much radiation and that she has a cancer in her neck.” (The reference to “radiation” is ambiguous; Eda may have been talking about the experiment or the exposure she had received from the many diagnostic tests.)
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