Misshapen kidneys12/26/2023 Her Google search led her to a Facebook group for international survivors of thalidomide, and she learned there that a lawsuit was being prepared on behalf of American victims.Įstimates of how many American babies were affected by thalidomide have varied. She needed to understand what had happened. Decades of burying her feelings had caught up with her, and she was struggling with depression and anxiety. Similarly emboldened, in 2011, Carolyn typed the words “thalidomide victim” into Google. A long-sleeved jacket would be too hot, yet she cringed when she imagined the photograph hanging on her wall, her arms exposed every time she walked by. In 2008, as she prepared for her daughter Angie’s summer wedding, Carolyn agonized over what to wear. A career in public relations followed, and she dabbled in local Democratic politics. Her lawyer sent them to a lab, but the tests could not determine whether they were thalidomide, and they were not returned.Ĭarolyn divorced, becoming a single mother.Īs she got older, she learned to slip her arms into her sleeves at job interviews, revealing her disability only after she was hired. This time, she pinned her mother down, and to her surprise, her mother handed over the old pills. Angered by her poor job prospects, she consulted a lawyer to look into the thalidomide story. Martin recalled.Ĭarolyn married at age 19 and quickly had two girls. Besides, the doctor had assured her they were safer than Alka-Seltzer, and she had taken only one or two, she said.Ĭarolyn’s arms were shorter, and she was missing fingers, but “it wasn’t the horrific deformities that they were telling about or showing,” Ms. Her doctor had given her a packet of pills early in her pregnancy that were for headaches, not morning sickness. Her mother, whose last name is now Martin, had heard about thalidomide, but said she didn’t connect it to Carolyn’s defects. They presented the baby in a tight swaddle, her too-short limbs tucked under a blanket. The nurses did not tell her about her newborn’s defects right away. Her mother, Marilyn, was 22 when she gave birth in March 1962. Her disability was like that - seen, yet unseen - for much of her childhood. It was one of many props he used to hide her birth defect as she grew up: cuddling a bear, seated behind her baby sister, in profile against a tree. Jennifer Vanderbes, who is researching a book about the history of thalidomide in the United States, said society owed the survivors in America a debt of gratitude.Ĭarolyn was just a year old in 1963 when her father, a Konica salesman and freelance wedding photographer, posed her for a portrait, a teddy bear obscuring her weaker, shorter left arm. Today, as the coronavirus circles the globe - claiming thousands of lives - there is a renewed push to rush potential cures to market, even if it means bypassing the checks and balances that were thalidomide’s legacy. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died in an opioid epidemic that has its roots in the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the painkiller Ox圜ontin and dishonest, aggressive marketing of the drug by its maker, Purdue Pharma. Historians say the lesson of thalidomide is one that society is still learning the hard way. survivors of thalidomide have found one another through Google searches and Facebook groups, joining forces to fight for justice, recognition and compensation. Today, more than half a century later, people who believe they are the U.S. The crisis led to passage of modern drug safety laws in the United States that required pharmaceutical companies to prove their medicines worked through rigorous clinical trials.īut the babies whose mothers took thalidomide in the United States were largely forgotten. The scandal briefly flared in the United States, where the drug was given to about 20,000 Americans in loosely run clinical trials sponsored by two American drug makers.
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