I don’t pretend to know more than the average Joe about eco-bulbs, but I get suspicious when the European Union and certain countries are outlawing “energy-consuming” incandescent bulbs, which do not use mercury.There’s a lot of information on this subject on the internet. I just checked out this one here.
Mercury danger, on the other hand, is a very real issue with me. My father worked around mercury for thirty years in making florescent bulbs for Westinghouse. We also had a coal burning furnace in our cellar, as did most other lower income families in the 1940s and 50s. Mercury is released from burning coals. My father also made thermometers, which contained liquid mercury. In fact, he used to bring home mercury and, as kids, we would roll it into balls and play with it, as I remember. None of the blue collar factory workers in those days were aware of such dangers. Then, at age forty-nine, my father had a massive stroke. He survived, but was never able to work again.
Our family had a very dedicated and brilliant doctor, Murray Levin, who treated my father. After an examination, he asked my mother if dad worked around mercury. Doctor Levin had been studying up on the symptoms of mercury poisoning and my father’s protruding blue veins were a sign of it. Doctor Levin was one of the last breed of general practitioners who did house calls. He wrote articles in medical journals admonishing the medical profession for encouraging specialization at the expense of a more universal knowledge of the whole body working as one organism. He also advocated house calls in cases where the sick person would only get sicker if he left the bed to come to an office. He was a great man, Murray Levin, with a brilliant mind and a big heart. He was the town doctor, an imposing six-foot-six I’d say, giving free physicals to all the kids who played sports for local leagues and schools. He kept strictly to his field, however, never even dropping the word “suit” to my mother in regard to Westinghouse. No, what he did do for dad though, was get in touch with a world-renowned heart specialist, Doctor Michael DeBakey (who died two years ago at ninety-nine), and schedule an appointment for him to see my father. My father’s disability income from Westinghouse paid for the trip to Texas and the exam. DeBakey had to tell my mother that there was nothing he could do. Any surgery would be too risky. He told my mother that dad would slowly slip into dementia and die from a fading heart beat, maybe lasting another five or six years. Well, good Doctor DeBakey was wrong about that. My mother put dad on a vitamin regime and he lived another thirty years, dying from a stroke, but never losing his faculties until the end.
I hope Doctor Levin accepted the Catholic Faith before he died.
