Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
The phone rang at 2am this morning--anytime you get a phone call in the middle of the night, you know it's bad news. One of my cousins phoned to tell me her father had died. He had been sick for a long long time, but I never saw anyone try harder to stay alive. He was on oxygen for years and often didn't have enough breath to eat--eating and breathing isn't synchronous.

In his youth he had been a smoker, but what really messed up his lungs was asbestosis. My Dad had it too. For decades many men from south Mississippi worked at Ingalls shipbuilding down on the Coast, constructing ships for the military (like the USS Cole that was attacked by two suicide bombers in the Middle East a few years ago.)

Back when the men who came down with asbestosis were working with these materials, they nor their employers knew the needle like fibers of asbestos could lodge in lungs and form scars, destroying tissue. Now asbestos is considered hazardous material and if you work around it you have to put on haz-mat suits. Makes me wonder how many things we consider "okay" now will prove to be deadly in the future.

susil