Nuclear fallout gave her cancer. Now she’s a dogged voice for America’s downwinders
When she was 29, Mary Dickson got thyroid cancer and chalked it up to bad luck or bad genes.
Her life had been pretty idyllic, despite being raised against the frightening backdrop of the Cold War.
She spent hours of her childhood running around in the gullies by her home near the mouth of Parleys Canyon in Salt Lake City. The neighborhood was packed with kids who pretended those rising and falling hills were rollercoasters, racing up and down, laughing and screaming. With seven kids in her house, she always had playmates.
Dickson and her friends also pretended at school. Children were taught to huddle under their wooden desks and cover their heads with their hands, pretending Russians were dropping bombs. Each child brought a bleach bottle filled with water, name scrawled in indelible marker so they’d have something to drink should bombs actually fall. Sometimes, they cowered in a “fallout shelter” — a crawlspace under the grade school— waiting for an audible all-clear.
But as most children get to do, Dickson grew up. She went to college, launched a career in journalism, married. Then came the cancer, with its then-brutal treatment: removal of her thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes, followed by radioactive iodine-infused medicinal drinks that made her ovaries light up during monitoring. Hospital staff put a “Caution, radioactive material!” sign on her hospital room door. Even those delivering meals would reach in just far enough to put food on a nearby tray.
KEY POINTS:
- Mary Dickson got thyroid cancer at 29 and only years later discovered it was caused by radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear weapons tests.
- The government acknowledges downwinders throughout Utah, Idaho and New Mexico, as well as parts of Arizona, Nevada and Missouri.
- But advocates for downwinders cite gaps — cancers and locations — and many people do not know they could be compensated.