Morbid Fact Du Jour For May 28, 2011

Today’s Impossible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

First-hand account from the wife of a first responder firefighter at Chernobyl.  It took him two weeks to die an agonizing death from radiation poisoning.

At the morgue they said, “Want to see what we’ll dress him in?”  I do!  They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap.  They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up.  They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn’t get it on him, there wasn’t a whole body to put it on.  It was all – wounds.  The last two days in the hospital – I’d lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it.  Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth.  He was choking on his internal organs.  I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff.  It’s impossible to talk about.  It’s impossible to write about.  And even to live through.  It was all mine.  My love.  They couldn’t get a single pair of shoes to fit him.  They buried him barefoot.

Culled from: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

I can’t help but wonder if some of those workers in Japan are going through a similar experience right now and, much like Chernobyl, we won’t find out about it until long after the fact?