With the injuries from my thyroid cancers and the worry over my husband's bladder and bone cancers, I was very angry and felt betrayed by my government. They used us as guinea pigs but we weren't even that good because the government never followed up to see what did happen to us downwinders.

I write poems, but they are all too mild for my anger at my government.

BETRAYAL

It's as safe as mother's milk, they'll say
When wanting to assure you that it's all O.K.
If mom, a downwinder, eats Columbia River's fish,
Or consumes white snow - garden salads on the spot
Then mother's milk can become a deadly lot.

So I fed poison to my nursing son
With radioactive iodine-131.
Just because we lived in the wrong place
I maimed my babe for that nuclear race.

Written by a woman who has lived all of her life in Eastern Washington and remembers consuming local milk and produce. Her husband loved to fish the Columbia River downstream from Hanford. Name withheld by request.

From WA DOH The Release of Radioactive Materials from Hanford: 1944-1972