Photo Credit: Fongfong2

In this grim medical fiction tale, a family profits from scrapping hospital equipment, leading to the deadly truth behind their ill-gotten gains.

This medical fiction tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies that appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. The technical details surrounding the event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are, therefore, entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish.

Nathan lived by the adage that one should make hay while the sun shines. In practice, this meant pillaging the decaying carcass of what used to be the county hospital. Shifts in demographics, an aging population, and a government more focused on ideology than governance had drained tax revenues, leading to relentless budget cuts. Public health was among the first casualties. The women’s health department vanished first, followed by pediatrics, psychiatry, and now radiology. Each closure sent shockwaves through the community, but few seemed to connect their voting choices with the consequences.

Not everyone was dismayed by the hospital’s decline. Nathan and his brother Bob saw it as an opportunity. With department heads long gone, Nathan, who worked in the hospital finance department, became the de facto overseer of inventory liquidation. He funneled surplus assets through his family network: his cousin, the appraiser, set suspiciously low valuations; another cousin, a realtor, handled the sale of satellite clinics; and Bob sold used inventory through the family scrapyard.

The closure of radiology was a particularly lucrative event, offering a mix of office furniture, medical equipment, and real estate. Since all the staff had been laid off, it fell to Nathan and Bob to go from room to room to inventory items. The office furniture was good for auction; the printers and copiers could be sold as individual pieces, and some of the office hardware, like metal fittings, would go to the scrapyard. Equipment that was identifiable went onto the website for individual sale: the scales, wall-mounted blood pressure cuffs and otoscopes, and space heaters, for example. Leftover equipment that was not easily moved or identified would be scrapped. Electric motors, transformers, and similar components would be recovered and sold, and the rest would be broken down to sell as base metals.

Among the haul was a hefty, stubby, stainless-steel canister that required considerable effort to transport. The hydraulic lift showed it weighed nearly 300 pounds—Bob estimated a quick $150 in scrap value alone.

Processing all the scrap took an entire week. When Bob finally got to the canister, he noticed that it was a kind of tube, closed off at one end by a steel plate with bolts and with some sort of glass at the other. He and his nephew, Cliff, used an angle grinder to cut the tube into sections and made a very pleasing discovery: the tube was indeed stainless steel (33 cents per pound), but it was only one-third inch thick, and the inner tube was made of lead ($1.05 per pound). They used the angle grinder to cut each section lengthwise so they could separate the steel from the lead and put the metal pieces into two piles. The last section had the bolted end cap, which they removed before cutting the tube open. Here they made a further discovery: in the center of the thick lead lining was another canister, also stainless steel, but much thinner. Cutting that open revealed many disks stacked tightly in a column. The disks fit into each other, and, holding one up, Bob guessed they were about two inches in diameter and about an inch and a half high. Where the angle grinder had bitten into the disks, he could see it was a gray-blue metal that he guessed was either just iron (4 cents per pound) or, if they were lucky, nickel ($7.22 per pound).

That Friday night, during the family’s weekly barbecue, Bob proudly displayed his discoveries. He also asked Aunt Dot for some of her special hemp hand lotion because handling the dusty, oily materials had given him eczema, making his hands itch. Cliff chimed in that his hands were also itching and that he’d needed to remove his wedding band because they’d begun to swell, too. The evening ended with a toast to Nathan, whose contacts and efforts had brought in so much money for the whole family.

Over the next few days, Aunt Dot saw her own business ramp up as several other family members asked for tubes of her special hemp hand lotion. Jokes were passed around about how itchy hands meant money, while jokes about Bob needing to do some housekeeping also circulated. It seemed like everyone who’d attended the BBQ now had itchy hands.

Bob had never been a particularly healthy guy. At the scrapyard, he spent most of his time at his desk or in front of the TV, and his diet consisted mainly of fatty meats and rich sauces poured over pasta. It was not, therefore, a huge cause for family alarm when Bob was admitted to the ER for dizziness, nausea, and vomiting three weeks later. Visiting him in the hospital was a bit of a shock, though, because while his heart problems were to be expected, nobody was quite sure how to explain why his hair was falling out in clumps.

The family grapevine was all abuzz when Cliff, 20 years younger than Bob and in much better physical shape, was admitted for the same symptoms, along with a hacking cough. The news had hardly grown cold before Nathan was rushed to the ER for dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, plus a nosebleed that just wouldn’t stop. As if on cue, Bob and Cliff developed impressive nosebleeds of their own, and Cliff started shedding hair like a husky in summertime.

Aunt Dot suggested that a curse was the source, but the doctors had other ideas. Soon, a truck from the Department of Energy arrived at the scrapyard. A robotic dog scouted the premises as HAZMAT-suited specialists trailed it, and a tethered drone whined overhead. The family gaped at the scene from afar. They were still staring at the spectacle when a call came from the hospital: Cliff had died suddenly before stunned doctors could hook up a machine to oxygenate his blood when his lungs failed.

Bob might have initially been very pleased had someone told him that the disks he and Cliff had cut into were, in fact, valued at $31 per pound. Other than its price, he would not have much understood the significance of the fact that the disks they’d cut into and handled were Cobalt-60 rather than nickel. He would have heard of the term “radioactive” before but would have associated it with nuclear weapons and science fiction movies rather than something found in dismantled equipment from a hospital. When explained to him by the investigator, Bob responded with confusion, “But they just looked like metal. They weren’t glowing or anything!”

Bob didn’t have to puzzle over it for long, though. He died the following day from sepsis and radiation poisoning. Nathan died a few days later but had a little more time to reflect on the balance sheet: five years of profiting from disposing of hospital equipment versus a life cut short by twenty.

Over the next few years, many other family members died, mostly of cancer, and mostly those who had attended the BBQ or had handled one of the curious “nickel” discs. Aunt Dot, however, lived until eighty-three—only to be undone not by radiation but by the arsenic in her beloved herbal teas. Some people, as they say, have all the luck.