Radiation exposure: When is a little way too much?

As long as I live, I will never forget one question: Was she exposed to radiation as a child?

No. Yes. I don’t know. Each of those answers bombarded my guilt-ridden brain in the days and weeks after my daughter was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer.

It was 2002. She was 19, a thriving, successful sophomore at Santa Clara University.

That fall, she had surgery at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. Over Christmas vacation that year, she underwent radioactive iodine treatment at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center.

She was incredibly brave, employing black humor about “Christmas in the lead room.” The treatment makes a patient temporarily radioactive, so she was isolated in a lead-lined room at the Seattle hospital.

My girl stayed in school. She took finals and maintained stellar grades that quarter. She is now 28, healthy, married and busy with her career.

That question about radiation exposure, asked by her doctors in 2002, still nags at both of us. In reading about her disease, which is very treatable, we learned that most thyroid cancers caused by radiation exposure are of the type she had.

It’s been almost a decade since that terrifying year. With the nuclear crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi complex spreading dangerous radiation, memories of what my daughter went through are flooding back.

Am I afraid? For the people of Japan, of course I am. For my family here? No. Yes. I don’t know.

I have read Herald writer Sharon Salyer’s stories about radiation monitoring sites in our state, the closest in Shoreline. I trust state Department of Health reports that recent radiation levels have remained in the normal background range. And sure, I know we are exposed to radiation every time we use a computer, talk on a cellphone or get some sun.

What keeps coming to mind is that question asked by my daughter’s doctors. She was born in Snohomish County and raised in north Everett. While I was pregnant with her, I worked at The Herald and sat in front of a 1980s-style computer terminal. Was that enough radiation to do harm?

When my daughter was 6 months old, she was crawling and tried to pull herself up on a table leg. She slipped and bumped out a baby tooth. I took her to the emergency room. A doctor referred me to a pediatric dentist.

That dentist took an X-ray of her mouth to see if the accident had disturbed the area below her gums, from which permanent teeth would grow. I was a new mom, age 29. It never occurred to me to question the wisdom of a baby having an X-ray.

Over the past year, The New York Times has done several articles about thyroid cancer. My daughter sent me a link to one of them, a long story published Nov. 22, 2010, and written by Walt Bogdanich and Jo Craven McGinty. The article’s focus was concern over dental X-rays for children.

Here is that article’s first paragraph: “Because children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to radiation, doctors three years ago mounted a national campaign to protect them by reducing diagnostic radiation to only those levels seen as absolutely necessary.”

When I read that, I was stunned. Did I cause my daughter’s cancer by allowing her to have a dental X-ray as an infant? I’ll never know the answer.

We trust in science — the best science that is currently known. That doesn’t mean the knowledge we understand today will be cutting-edge science accepted 20 or 50 years from now.

I was born in Spokane in 1953, and grew up there. Court cases involving people known as “downwinders,” those who believe their illnesses were caused by exposure to radiation from the Hanford nuclear reservation, dragged on more than 60 years after work began at Hanford.

Just last year, Spokane’s Spokesman-Review newspaper published articles about the Labor Department notifying former Hanford workers of possible government compensation related to jobs that exposed them to cancer-causing radiation between 1943 and 1972.

Who knew in 1943 that going to work at Hanford or living nearby might cause cancer or other thyroid disease?

Yes, fear of radiation from Japan may be irrational and unscientific. Nevertheless, those fears are real.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.

Program on tsunami and radiation risks

The Everett Office of Emergency Management will present a workshop on the disaster in Japan, earthquakes, tsunamis, radiation and Everett’s risks from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday in the Weyerhaeuser Room, fourth floor of Everett Station, 3201 Smith Ave. To reserve a place, call 425-257-8111 or email Renee Darnell at rdarnell@ci.everett.wa.us.