My brain: be normal be normal be normal be normal be normal this person could be your friend don't fuck it up please be normal
Me: so yeah in world war one soldiers couldn't see the faces of normal watches when in the trenches when it got dark so there were watches made with luminous paint so they could see the numbers. The problem was that this luminous paint was made from radium and they were all hand painted, and the painters who were all women because all the men were at war had to use these special brushes when painting that had a superfine tip but to keep the tip pointed they'd have to point the brush with their lips and what that means is that they put the tips of the brushes in their mouths and by doing that they all ended up injesting some of the radium. The radium then got deposited in their bones and made them horribly sick, like their jawbones started disintegrating in their mouths and when that caused them to lose teeth the wounds from the lost teeth never healed properly and then would get infected and they also got tumors and they lost a bunch of weight and became really weak and all kinds of horrible things because of radiation poisoning. At first nobody thought that this could've been from the radium because it was believed to be a kind of magical cure all. And when some people started to suppose that it could be related to the radium many people didn't believe them and those of the women who were still alive and well enough and brave enough to try to earn compensation for their illness faced an extremely hard time. They were viewed as greedy liars and were shunned in their communities for it and when a doctor of the girls said that the condition of radium poisoning was fatal and without any cure the hearing had to be halted because one of the girls just about fainted in the court room. Eventually these girls were lucky enough to win their case and they were compensated for their illness and doctor visits and that some of them had to pay nannies because they were physically unable to care for their kids, some of the girls managed to live happy lives after this despite their condition but one of them died pretty much directly after she was informed that they won the case. Other women that sued their employers for them having gotten radium poisoning were given compensation so little that it was insulting and others didn't even win their cases or settle out of court and they got nothing. This was when workers protection and compensation laws didn't do anything and those of the women and their lawyers that got compensation had to fight tooth and nail to get anything. And many of the women died without ever knowing what was wrong with them and getting misdiagnoses ranging from doctors doing their best with what information they had and diagnosing them with phosphorus poisoning to downright insulting and absolute preposterous diagnosises of syphilis. These women were in some places called ghost girls for the way they literally glowed when they left their jobs because of the radium paint and radium powder they ended up covered in, the nickname "ghost girls" ended up having a different meaning though, because of what the radium poisoning did to their bodies. There are/were also more widely called the radium girls because obviously of their relationship with radium and I read this book about them and
