PH26561 - Man fears old chemical experiments are killing him

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Community : Bradford
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Description : At age 15 Gord began working at the experimental farm in the Holland Marsh. Gord's job was to spray various substances on the carrot crop in the spring, then harvesting samples of the sprayed carrots in the fall. It was a great job. All he had to do was measure out chemicals from drums, stirring them with a stick, and then spray them on designated areas from his backpack container. Gord today recognizes some of the names on the containers as dangerous chemicals that were banned in the late '50s and early '60s. At the time, the attitude was more casual. When a grasshopper landed on his lunch one day, he squirted it with some leftover spray. "It began to shake, then fell off. We laughed, but we knew wee were dealing with deadly stuff," Gord recalled. Another day, when he found the strawberry plot infested with leaf hoppers, he sprayed them with a toxic insecticide called parathion. After lunch, he was surprised to see his supervisor arrive in her car in a cloud of dust. Had he put anything on the strawberries, she asked. Yes, he said. A worker names Matt had eaten a bowl of the strawberries with cream for lunch. He was in hospital. Matt, once doctors knew the poison involved, recovered. About 10 years ago, Gord began feeling tired and was putting on more weight than he should. Each time he went to see the doctor, he was told his heart and lungs and cholesterol level were fine, and that he should just lose a few pounds. Instead of losing weight when he went on a diet, he gained. Last New Year's he ended up in hospital in Newmarket with a bleeding ulcer. It was only then that a doctor noticed symptoms of cirrhosis of the liver. How much did he drink, Gord was asked. He didn't drink or smoke, he insisted. When did he stop drinking? He had never taken more than a glass of wine, he said again and again. Specialists in Toronto found it hard to believe. Cirrhosis is almost always triggered by heavy drinking or by hepatitis. One day in hospital, he noticed the name Philman on a volunteer's badge. She asked if he was the Gord Compton she used to know years ago in Bradford? When he explained why he was in hospital, she said, "I think you and I better talk. I'm Connie's widow." Connie, who had worked on the farm with Gord, had died of cancer at 47, she said. Connie knew the three Guelph students who had worked on the project. All three, she said, died of cancer in their late 30s. When he got out of hospital, Gord wrote to the women who had been his supervisor so long ago. She wrote back in an unsteady hand to tell him she had liver disease. Gord, once a guy who was full of energy, moves slowly now. His liver is almost totally out of commission. He exists on a precarious balance of drugs, susceptible all the time to infection. He has been told he could live for 2.5 years. "I don't want to start any campaign," Gord told me. "I haven't got the fight left in me. The people who were involved are mostly dead. You can't prove anything and you can't get mad at anyone."
"It was a good time to grow up," he said, reflecting. "But it was a time when some of those chemical companies could get away with murder."