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3 at death’s door 75 My Man-Made Keloid On May 20, 1955, after fourteen months of hospitalization, twenty-two crewmembers of the Lucky Dragon #5—all except Kuboyama—left the hospital. Yet leaving the hospital didn’t mean that we’d regained our health. My liver was still swollen, and I still had slight diarrhea. On May 17, before we left the hospital, city and prefectural authorities had agreed that “discharging the crewmembers from the hospital at this time forms one link in their medical treatment; the authorities will not regard any future re-hospitalization as a separate matter, and all costs will be covered by seamen’s comp.” After leaving the hospital, we had medical check-ups once a year, either in Tokyo or in Yaizu. In 1957 the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) was established in Chiba and took over our care. The NIRS was founded as a research center of the Science and Technology Agency in response to the Bikini Incident. Since being discharged from the hospital, I’d never missed a check-up. The Institute had the following three main goals: 1. to study the effects of radiation on the human body; also prevention, diagnosis, and treatment; 2. to study the medical uses of radiation; and 3. to train experts in the prevention of radiation damage to the human body and in diagnosis, treatment, and the medical uses of radiation. 76 CHAPTER THREE Each January and February, we were divided into groups of three or four and admitted to the hospital on a Sunday. Examinations were scheduled through Thursday, but the hospital usually crammed them in so we’d be able to go home on Wednesday. They never told us the results, so we didn’t know what they were. But there were dozens of blood tests and many other tests. Sometimes they used equipment not available anywhere else in Japan. I’d long noticed that all the crewmembers who’d died so far—Kuboyama, Kawashima, Masuda, Suzuki, Masuda, Yamamoto, Suzuki, Takagi—had had liver damage. So I wrote on my hospital papers that I particularly wanted my liver checked. Beginning around 1991, it was happening to me, too: my fingernails began to turn dark purple, and when I leaned forward, the area around my lips swelled up; I had to lie quietly in bed before I’d recover. Moreover, the scar from the annual bone marrow aspiration (they punctured my breastbone to draw bone marrow) gradually formed a keloid, a thick, oval scab nearly four inches long. Since this was causing me pain, I still had to go once a month to a hospital near my house to get an injection of painkiller. At my check-up in 1992, I was worried and asked the doctor in charge about the keloid and about whether I hadn’t perhaps been infected with hepatitis-C virus. He replied, “We’re checking for hepatitis-C; I’ll send you the results.” Up till then, at the conclusion of our check-ups, the doctor would give us advice like, “Your liver readings are a bit high, so eat something before you drink alcohol .” But perhaps because I’d said I wanted to know the results of the exam, after the 1992 exam the doctor called us one by one into his office and outlined the results. My liver GOT level was 110, my GPT was 166, and my gamma-GTP level was 82—all way above normal. The doctor also said, “I see a shadow on your stomach, so do get a detailed exam at a large hospital with a specialty in circulatory organs.” For some reason he seemed strangely unsettled, uneasy. But I didn’t think much about it at the time and went home. Later I had another thorough medical examination at Tōhō Medical University Hospital, had a camera inserted into my stomach, but it found nothing unusual. However, my spleen was swollen, and I was indeed infected with hepatitis-C. What’s more, it had developed into cirrhosis of the liver. I waited and waited for the results of the NIRS exam, but they were never sent. The government acknowledged no connection between exposure and illness . Worried about the aftereffects of radiation, we’d relied on the NIRS exam. But in this situation, I simply couldn’t trust it. I began to suspect the NIRS had known all along about the condition of the ten crewmembers who’d already died, but they...

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