Dying To Do the Laundry

It happens in large families all the time: Parents organize kids by age and ability, and then they divvy up the chores.

Kati Maloney was the second-oldest daughter of eight, and her job was the laundry. Week after week, she gathered and sorted the clothes in the family's basement on Cleveland's west side.

Her father's work clothes took extra effort. She'd grab one shirt at a time, turn her head and shake. With every snap, dust particles from asbestos filled the air.

Week after week, Kati breathed in the dust.

Four decades later, Kati couldn't breathe anymore.

Kathleen Maloney LoPresti died at 55 from mesothelioma, the same asbestos-related disease that killed her father and her uncle. Unlike her dad, she never worked directly with the deadly "magic mineral." But she took good enough care of him for it to kill her anyway.

The question looms: How many more Kati's are there?

"We know the secondary victims of asbestos are out there," said Dr. Pasi Janne, a thoracic oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and one of Kati's doctors. "We don't know how many there are, and we don't know yet if they're mostly women."

It may be getting easier to connect the dots from what we do know.

So far, mostly white, male laborers get mesothelioma, Janne said. They were the guys who got the better-paying, often union, jobs that exposed them to asbestos, which also increased their chances of getting lung cancer.

It was mostly women — their mothers, wives and daughters — who washed their clothes.

It takes anywhere from 10 to 50 years after exposure for the first symptoms of the deadly disease to show up. By then, the news is so bad, so certain, that the only question remaining is, "How long?"

The list of workers exposed to asbestos could fill this column and includes pipe fitters, carpenters, brake mechanics, painters, electricians, welders, engineers, longshoremen, roofers, plumbers and just about any kind of plant worker you could name.

Asbestos still is found today in thousands of products, including ceiling and floor tiles, chalkboards, plaster, carpeting, fireproofing materials and all sorts of insulation.

Kati was misdiagnosed initially, but in her heart, she knew, and she found the doctors to prove it. Her husband, Michael LoPresti, said she settled several lawsuits against the companies that exposed her father, and then her, to asbestos. That money helped fuel both her treatment and her charity, Kati's Hope Foundation for Mesothelioma (www.katishope.com).

But one of the conditions of settlement was Kati's silence, a legal machination designed to mask any acknowledgement of blame and keep other deserving plaintiffs in the dark. So I can't tell you who they are. Yet another longstanding tradition of companies who exposed their workers to the risks of asbestos long after they knew it could kill them.

There's much we don't know yet about mesothelioma. We don't know why some get it and others don't. We don't know whether one big-time exposure is worse than chronic low-dose exposures. And we don't know yet how many more women will get it.

What we do know is that, right now, it is a death sentence.

Time will tell how many more women like Kati are out there. One of the reasons her story haunts me is the memory of my own mother, a nonsmoker who died at 62 of a lung disease doctors insisted had no known cause.

My father worked at an electric plant, where he was exposed regularly to asbestos. He always worried about money and insisted none of his daughters be allowed near the washer because he was certain we would waste water with half-empty loads.

And so, week after week, my mother stood on the back porch and shook out his work clothes, which she washed separately.

I remember the snap of the shirts in the wind.

I remember the dust flitting around her like sparkles.

And I remember her sometimes saying, to no one in particular, "Would it kill you to do the laundry?"

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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