Ella cleverly told them they wouldn't be able to do an autopsy when he died. They paid up pretty quick after that.

[NNadir]

I found this one that came in on my news feed pretty amusing, if heavy radiation exposure in an industrial accident can really be amusing:

What did Atomic Man teach us about radiation exposure? James Conca, Nuclear News, July 10, 2024.

In 1976 at the Hanford Site in Washington state, a 64-year-old chemical operations technician named Harold McCluskey was working on columns filled with special exchange resins in a glove box at the Plutonium Finishing Plant.

The laboratory had been closed for five months as a result of a strike, and McCluskey was wary of resuming this particular work, remembering earlier warnings of working with resins that were unattended for that long a time. But his boss said to proceed. After adding nitric acid to columns containing americium (Am-241) and other radionuclides, the column exploded, spraying leaded glass, nitric acid, and radioactive materials into McCluskey’s face.

In seconds, he received 500 times the amount of radiation considered safe over an entire lifetime—thousands of times greater than the dose received by anyone contaminated at Fukushima, and greater than that of many who responded to Chernobyl. McCluskey became known as the Atomic Man, and the lab—never to be used again—was dubbed the McCluskey Room...

... Since McCluskey received such high radiation doses from this accident (cumulative absorbed doses to the bone, bone surface, liver, and lung were 18, 520, 8, and 1.6 Gy, respectively2), it was surprising that he did not die from any radiation-induced cancer or other rad-health effect. He passed away 11 years after the accident at the age of 75 from congestive heart failure—the result of long-standing coronary artery disease...

The amusing part:

...An investigation into the explosion confirmed that the resin mixture had become unstable exactly as McCluskey had feared, and the government finally settled in 1977 for $275,000 plus lifetime medical expenses. This accident was one of those unusual events that provides a lot of critical data on human biological effects of radiation, so the government also wanted to study his body after he died.

According to McCluskey’s wife, Ella, the government balked at paying the settlement. A former teacher and nurse, Ella cleverly told them they wouldn’t be able to do an autopsy when he died. They paid up pretty quick after that...

Tough lady with a tough guy.

I requested the papers in Health Physics, an issue in 1995, on the autopsy findings.

[Eko]

1. Sounds fun.

McCluskey was helped from the room, had his clothing removed and was washed with water at the scene. He was transferred to a decontamination facility where he was washed again and given a dose of one gram of Ca-DTPA on arrival. For the first week he had two baths per day, then he had one bath per day for two months. For the first five days he was treated with the calcium complex of DTPA and then after that for four years he was treated with a total of 583 grams of the zinc complex of DTPA. The treatment reduced the systemic deposition to 500 kBq instead of the 19 MBq which he would otherwise have retained inside his body.

Because of risk of exposure to other individuals, McCluskey was placed in isolation in the Hanford Emergency Decontamination Facility for five months and underwent chelation therapy using DTPA by Dr. Bryce Breitenstein.[3] By 1977, his body's radiation count had fallen by about 80%.