Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Is Doing to Hide It, and How t by Devra Davis

Author:Devra Davis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: West 26th Street Press
Published: 2015-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

​CHAPTER ​7​. ​

THE TROUBLE WITH MEN

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything. —Albert Einstein

Eric and Nancy, both in their mid-thirties, began sensing that biological clock that says it’s now or never. In 2007, they got married, bought a home, and tried to start a family. Successful computer programmers, they had plunked down several hundred dollars for high tech gear that measured the tiny surge in hormones that signaled precisely when one of the three hundred thousand eggs from Nancy’s ovaries moved into the end of one of the fallopian tubes, where it could be fertilized. After two years, it was starting to look like now had become never. They had tried everything that doctors and well-intentioned family members had suggested. Red blankets, vitamin E, long walks, deep talks, and diligent coupling had not produced pregnancy. Every morning, Nancy took her temperature and tested her urine. When she registered a bit warmer than usual with a spurt in hormones, Nancy would call Eric, who had often left for work before dawn and always kept his cell phone in his front pocket. He talked on his phone more than five thousand minutes a month. Eric would dash home to make sure that they were able to give it their best shot. Lovemaking had become work. They were beginning to feel like failures.

Libby still doesn’t know why she could not get pregnant forty years ago. But she has long had her suspicions. She and her young husband, John, had grown up knowing each other slightly, but after attending the same college, they fell in love and got married when they were just twenty-one. Their fathers had shared offices at the largest municipal energy utility in America—the L.A. Department of Water and Power. When their wives were both pregnant, the dads laid bets on which one of their children would be born first. After John’s birth, Libby followed two weeks later.

On vacation trips with their electrical engineer dad, Libby and her siblings visited power plants, substations, electricity generating dams, turbines, and generators. Their skin would tingle and their hair would stand on end because of the high-voltage electricity surging around them. At family gatherings after Libby and John got married, their parents would toast to the grandchildren they hoped for. Libby and John were eager to start a family. As months and years passed without pregnancy, they went through prolonged heartbreak.

Libby’s dad, Floyd L. Goss, a Berkeley graduate in electrical engineering, worked for years overseeing electrical line installations in California, the fastest growing state in the nation. Libby’s mom later wondered if what she believed was a dream job setting up high-power electricity might have caused the array of chronic health ailments that her husband developed by his early forties.

Nobody then thought to ask whether Libby and John’s infertility could have anything to do with their unusual childhood vacations or where their fathers had worked.

“My mother used to say

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