Death by Radiation
USINFO | 2013-09-10 12:08
Radiation has always been a double-edged sword. Its discovery brought Marie Curie the Nobel Prize, but it also caused her death in 1934. Radiation is often used as a cancer remedy, but like any other medical device, it must be used carefully and cautiously. Sadly, the chemotherapy of Scott Jerome-Parks was neither careful nor cautious. Jerome-Parks required treatment for tongue cancer, but medical staff in a New York City hospital did not notice a computer error that caused the radiation to be targeted on the 43-year-old’s brain stem and neck. These off target beams of radiation went on for three days.
As Scott Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his fatal radiation overdose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally unable to breathe — be studied and talked about publicly so that others might not have to live his nightmare.
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