Word: joking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first thing Lemmon learns is that a horse is a treacherous animal-a friend to your face but an enemy to your rear. He also learns to sleep on the bare ground, to catch naps in the saddle, to laugh at the cowboys' jokes-and they laugh hardest when the joke is practical. One day, just for the hell of it, somebody wraps a "prairie eel" around somebody else's neck, and everybody gives the victim the heehaw until the rattlesnake gives him a bite. It is then that the greenhorn learns what a human life is worth...
...Jacoba ("Joke") Haanschoten, 5, a child of a Putten factory worker, had enlarged and infected adenoids that threatened to block a Eustachian tube. Such blockage could, in turn, cause infection of the middle ear. A fortnight ago Joke (pronounced Yo-ka) went to Utrecht's City and Academic Hospital, 25 miles away. Doctors decided to destroy the diseased, swollen tissue with powerful gamma rays from a radium "needle"-actually a blunt metal capsule, 20 mm. by 3 mm., on a long, flexible shaft. One doctor pushed this up Joke's nose until it curved down into the nasopharynx...
That night Joke began to vomit. Her parents wrapped the vomit in newspaper and tossed it into the stove. Next morning Joke seemed all right and went off to kindergarten; her father threw the ashes from the stove on a backyard dump. A doctor, checking radium needles at the hospital, noticed that the tip of the one used on Joke (it had already been condemned because of oxidation at the junction of head and shaft) was missing. When it could not be found in the treatment room, out went the alarm...
While public-health officials worked to decontaminate the Haanschoten family and their neighbors, doctors pieced together a theory of what had happened. The needle - a powerful 50 millicurie source, 500,000 times what can be safely left in the body for a lifetime-had broken off in Joke's nasopharynx. She had swallowed it. During the evening, the radiation made Joke sick. When she vomited, up came the needle. In the stove, the capsule was destroyed and the radium salt was scattered through the ashes...
Decontamination was expected to take weeks, the greatest danger being radioactive ashes and dust, which are hard to control. Joke was back at the hospital for observation last week and seemed well enough, but there was grave danger that she might later develop cancer...