“Da.” Dr. Nesterenko, medical director of the Minsk Radiation Institute nods, “you have cesium 137 in your body.”   I’m sitting in a high, narrow, upholstered chair that looks more than a little used.   It looks like it was pulled out of an old airplane or a 70’s mini-van.

     The chair is wired with special sensors connected to a row of old style computers, large and clunky.  When you sit in the chair and press against the back the gamma rays in your body register in bright, bubble gum colored peaks on the screen.  The height of the peaks indicates the amount of cesium 137. 

  Four or five members of our team have already been tested.   Each one has gotten the thumbs up.  Each time Adi says, “You see, now don’t you feel better?”

     I look over at Adi when my results are computed.  She’s covering her eyes and slowly moving away from the chair.   Suddenly it’s like I’m wearing a big CESIUM 137 pin on my clothes.

    We all went to the same places, ate the same food, breathed the same contaminated air, ate almost none of the contaminated food except for Svetlana’s home- grown potatoes in the exclusion zone.  And only I have cesium.  I’m in my own exclusion zone now, a place no one wants to join me. 

   It’s how I felt when the dermatologist looked at some odd looking skin on my hand and pronounced it cancer.   It wasn’t serious in the end, but I felt like a leper when I said the word “cancer” to people.   One friend said, “Are you going to tell our health support group,” as though they might throw me out.   My doctor told me, “You could have gotten this from spilling hot coffee on your hand.  You didn’t do anything to get this.”

     I didn’t do anything to get the cesium either, but neither did the millions of people who live in Belarus and Ukraine.  They were just living their lives when the nuclear accident happened.

     I don’t feel any different - there’s nothing to tell me that gamma rays are flashing through my body.  My cesium count was 11.83, a level that’s considered low in adults--anything below 70 is considered safe.   But cesium can cause cancer.  It’s something you don’t want in any amount.

        Dr. Nesterenko held up a flimsy paper container with a smiling child on it. “Pectin.” His research has concluded that apple pectin in concentrated doses can help the body expel the cesium.  I don’t know if other scientists agree with this conclusion, but this is the remedy he proposes to me.    For the next few weeks I’ll be drinking a vile concoction of thick brownish powder mixed with water -- clean, filtered water.

     I would be exaggerating to say that the team, the “clean” team moved away from me when I got the cesium reading, but there was a subtle shift.  They did stare at the floor, unable to say anything.

      Before this I hadn’t understood the lack of outrage the Belarusian’s have.  They seemed so humdrum about radiation.  Now I didn’t feel angry or upset either.  I was in disbelief.  Radiation is invisible, colorless, and odorless; when it’s in your body you can’t feel its immediate effect.  Birth defects, most cancers, asthma, congenital heart defects, doctors will say it’s possible there is a correlation, but they won’t conclude that you got it from the radioactive particles in the air and the food.

      I felt like it was a personal failure.  If I was stronger, if I didn’t take my mask off when I was filming, if I didn’t eat the potatoes, if I had taken more preventive pectin, then I would have stopped the cesium from entering my perfect body.  I felt ashamed.   I felt weak.  

     And no one was rushing over to say, “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right.”  There was separation.   There were the haves and the have-nots, being one of the haves wasn’t a good thing.   There was now an invisible, colorless, odorless, hush in the room from the others that said, “I’m glad it’s not me and how awful it had to be you.”

     Only the Belarusian translator Natasha, who had a little more cesium in her body than I had in mine, could commiserate with me.    I linked arms with her.  “We’re the cesium sisters,” I said. 

     She laughed.  “What can we do?”  “You’ll be all right.  You’re leaving this country in a few days.  You’ll return to a place with clean water, you’ll breathe clean air, eat good, clean food. The people here don’t have that choice.  They’ll keep getting contaminated over and over and over.  I live in an uncontaminated area and I still have a little cesium.  I do what I can to eat clean food, I take vitamins, but that’s all I can do.”

     I saw it now.  I had been exactly like the other members of the team in talking to the Belarusians.  Pitying.  Not uncompassionate, but I did have a “there but for the grace of god go I” sense in my head.  Now I was on the other side - “all those with cesium step to the side” - that’s what it felt like, just as it had with the cancer. 

     Back then the only person I could talk to wass a friend’s husband who was going to the same dermatologist for skin cancer.   We waited together for the dreaded biopsies to see if the cancer had metastasized.

     Jerry was lucky, as was I.  We were both cancer free, stepping back over the line to the clean group.

   Maybe it’s human nature to feel relief when you’re not the one who’s in crisis.  It’s not that I didn’t feel the anguish of the Belarusians but I was removed from it.  I couldn’t understand what they felt

       I wasn’t the observer anymore. I stood with them now.

       I don’t want to compare my cesium poisoning to the consequences the people of Belarus have suffered.   I will recover. I don’t live in a contaminated area.

     They have lived through the worst environmental disaster in the world’s history.  They will be contaminated day in and day out for their lifetimes, and their children’s lifetimes, and on and on and on for years and years. 

     Dr. Nesterenko handed me my container of pectin, then wagged his finger at me,           “You must take it. Then the cesium will leave your body.”

        I took the pectin for the first week as I had been instructed.  It tasted like rotten liquid apples.  Then I began to doubt the pectin. I didn’t understand how that machine had known that I had gamma rays in my body.  Sensors? What kind of sensors? Gamma Ray sensors?   It was all sounding too science fiction for me. I slacked off with the pectin taking my chances that my “clean” radioactive free environment would rid me of any cesium still clinging to my cells.

    But I didn’t doubt what I had learned about separation.  Whenever something unfortunate happens to someone else - disease, divorce, death, job loss, act of terrorism, our survival mechanism kicks in, we start stepping away, we don’t want to get too close.   We don’t want to get “it.”  We separate.

When the bravest thing to do is to go right up to it, we’re only a step away anyway; we just don’t want to admit it.   Disease can strike the most seemingly healthy person. Unemployment hits people who would never expect it.  Divorce happens to people who think everything is okay.  It will happen to us - some of it.  We’ll all definitely die, yet we’re afraid to talk about death, to go near the dying. 

      Stepping forward, stepping into it-- that’s the way we can be there for someone else and for ourselves.   We can let them know that we are them or we will be them, maybe not now but someday.  We will be the diseased, the dying, the divorced, the jobless, the homeless, and the ones who have terrorism hit us in our family, in our country.   Didn’t we learn that in 2001?    Weren’t we the masters of feeling sorry for those “other people”  the ones in the world who bad things happened to - and then suddenly we were the ones suffering as though our pain was beyond any suffering the world had ever known.

    I heard an American woman say when the terrorists hit the World Trade Center she rushed in to be there for some of the “lost boys” from the Sudan who were working for her. “But they didn’t need comforting,” she said, “They were used to these awful things happening in their world.  They were the ones comforting me.”

     We need to be in the corner with the person who’s suffering, not outside the corner looking in; it’s when we are together that we’re in the safe place, not separate.

     In my travels to Chernobyl I did a lot of stepping away -- from the poverty, from the lack of health services, from the abandoned babies, from the diseases, from the deformities, the babies hanging onto life by threads.  I didn’t know how to step forward.   I only knew how to feel sorry for them. 

     An Australian aboriginal woman once said, “If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you are coming because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together.”   I read that long before I went to Chernobyl.  I thought I understood.

  I didn’t. 

      Nuclear accidents can happen anywhere.  Terrorism can too.   There are 476 nuclear reactors around the world. 

     As I write this the sarcophagus - the stone coffin around the Chernobyl reactor -- is desperately in need of repair.  No one in the world seems to care.   Yet if the sarcophagus collapses and spews out the remaining 97% of nuclear radiation that is still inside the world will be seriously affected.

      As I write this the nuclear reactor at Indian Point, just 35 miles outside of New York City, is permanently without a safe evacuation plan.  There is no safe evacuation plan possible.  It was greed and insanity that allowed that plant to get built so close to an urban area.    If an accident occurs New York City will be uninhabitable for the next 25,000 years.   Yet politicians and business owners debate whether to close it or not.   Even if it’s closed the danger will remain.   

     When I left Belarus Dr. Nesterenko said, “Tell your country to close all the nuclear power plants, nuclear power is too dangerous.  The world is not civilized enough to have it.”

A new structure was put over the existing sarcophagus at Chernobyl in 2016 and construction was completed in 2018. The New Safe Confinement took 12 years to design and construct and cost $2.3 billion dollars. The new shelter is designed to contain radiation for the next 100 years.

Maryann DeLeo is a documentary filmmaker and has received numerous awards, including two Emmy Awards, an Alfred I. duPont -Columbia University Award, and a CableACE Award.  Her work has premiered at the American Museum of the Moving Image and has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Her 2003 work, “Chernobyl Heart,” reveals the devastating effects of radiation on children after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl.  The film has garnered international attention and won the 2003 Academy Award ® for Best Documentary Short.

Her photography has appeared in national and international publications including Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and various European publications.