[AT] Poison Ivy

[Indiana Robinson]

My father started spraying corn fields and fence rows with 2-4-D in the
1940's right after WW-II. DDT in the milking barn was a daily thing. They
bought this farm in 1951 and it was massively overgrown with Honey Locust
thorn trees. You know, the kind with "giant" thorns.
I spent a lot of years spraying all manner of stuff and my father was not
very safety minded when it came to spraying. Of course neither was the
government back then. My father used to preach at me that it was required
that the spray mix HAD to run off of every leaf of every plant.
About 10 years ago my Doctor moved away and we had to find a new one. She
sat me down and asked a thousand questions, knowing that I was a farmer,
and made big list of all of the things I had been exposed to. Then she put
me on a sort of an automatic list I guess pretty much saying that I had a
very high probability of cancer. So far so good, still in the clear.
By age 11 I was spraying agent orange (mix of 2-4-D, 2-4-5-T and stove oil)
all summer long using a three gallon metal hand sprayer, spraying all kinds
of brush and especially those Honey Locust about 4 to 5 feet up the trunks.
We sprayed all of our corn with 2-4-D at "lay-by". By the time I was about
14 I was doing about all of the spraying. I can't begin to name all of the
stuff I sprayed over the years, mostly typical corn belt chemicals as they
came along. Lasso, Treflan, Atrazine, 2-4-D-B, many others and of course
Round-up... I still use Round-up and 2-4-D but I'm pretty conservative with
them.
During those years I also worked with a fair amount of asbestos, sawing,
drilling and nailing it as well as removing it from several structures
(before modern restrictions).
When Diana and I got married I worked for a number of years I worked in a
plastics plant and constantly worked with a bunch of kind of scary solvents
with big warning labels that the company didn't take very seriously...
Then we owned a store and added a shoe repair shop (an old family trade)
and for 20 years I worked daily in a cloud of quite squirrley adhesives,
solvents and thinners.
Every time I go see the doctor she asks the same batch of questions making
sure nothing is going wrong. That and checking me for any indications of
our family curse. Of my parents and my sister and myself I am the only one
that has not been diagnosed with Altzheimers... They are all gone now...
Both my mother and my sister died from it. My father had it pretty bad but
congestive heart failure killed him first.
Like I said, "so far so good". At 78 I'm still passing all of my tests.
:-)

-- 
-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.antique-tractor.com/pipermail/at-antique-tractor.com/attachments/20200614/be3778fc/attachment.htm>