Environmental writing piece
I grew up in a suburban housing development known as Cherokee Ranch, just north of Reading, Pennsylvania. One block away from our home was Cabot Berylco, a company that produced beryllium, a metallic element used as a component in steel. Our proximity to the plant was always a concern. My mother clipped and saved articles from the Reading Eagle/Times, which reported not only on the constant environmental violations of the plant, but more poignantly on the people affected by berylliosis, a lung disease caused by beryllium. The articles told of a woman contracting the disease after visiting the cemetery next to the factory every week, and of a young mother who contracted the disease after working as a secretary for another beryllium factory near Reading.
When my mother started coughing incessantly, her doctors performed a biopsy. The results were negative for cancer, but also negative for berylliosis. She was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a disease that cannot be concretely diagnosed. After suffering with other illnesses most of her life, including kidney disease and myasthenia gravis, she lived for eight years with this diagnosis of sarcoidosis. Before she died at age forty-nine, she made me promise to have an autopsy done, so we would finally know what had killed her.
Expecting to hear that beryllium had been the cause, I was confused when the cause of death was ruled to be malignant lymphoma of the lungs. Experts reviewed her medical records and found that although she had lymphoma all along, it was impossible to diagnosis in her first biopsy. I wondered if the beryllium could be the cause of the cancer. Information I’ve found about beryllium disease does not link it to malignant lymphoma. In 1999, after reading yet another article about berylliosis in the Reading papers, I contacted a doctor at Penn who is a beryllium expert. He wished to meet with me to discuss my mother’s case. I regret that I never set up a time to meet with him. I had just returned to college full-time and feared that talking about my mother’s illness might interfere with the completion of my degree.
Now that I have earned my degree in American Studies, I am ready to focus on documenting my personal experience with my mother’s death and its possible connection to the toxic pollution in Cherokee Ranch. I find myself reading autobiographies looking for others who have experienced situations close to my own. I would like to develop an article, possibly for publication. In order to do this I need to become more comfortable with my own writing. I would like to learn interviewing techniques so that I can comfortably contact the physician at Penn, as well as the residents of Cherokee Ranch—although we were neighbors, we are essentially strangers that share a common bond.
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I wrote this for an environmental writing class I signed up for in 2001, but didn’t finish. I did however meet the Penn doctor for lunch one day. It was very awkward– when I contacted him in the first place, he suggested going out to lunch to talk– he was very interested. When we went out, we went to a place that was a little pricey for me (and I paid my share), and he acted like he didn’t know where Cherokee Ranch was, and essentially told me there was no connection between beryllium and cancer.