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Something That Can Never Be Replaced

BY KEVIN CRAVER

Daniel Kalash promised to sleep on the couch until Susan, his wife of 21 years, recovered from brain-cancer surgery and rejoined him in their bed.

He never slept in that bed again – Susan succumbed to aggressive glioblastoma Oct. 17, 1996, the day before she was supposed to return home.

Brian DiBlasi woke up in an ambulance in August 2004 after suffering a grand mal seizure at a Des Plaines health club. Four club members had to hold him down.

The cause turned out to be oligodendroglioma, a very rare brain cancer.

Both men share tragedy. They also share having spent a lot of time in McCullom Lake – Kalash and his wife as adults, and DiBlasi as a child. And with a federal lawsuit filed against five manufacturing companies north of town on behalf of other brain-cancer victims, they now share a concern that their tragedies were not chance or God’s will.

"Maybe it was just a coincidence," Kalash said at his Ingleside home, his eyes filling with tears and his finger tapping on Susan’s death certificate, which he takes wherever he goes.

"But the more I think about it, if it isn’t and they’re responsible, they took something that can never be replaced. She missed her first granddaughter, her son’s 21st birthday, her daughter’s 18th. The years of planning our 25th wedding anniversary. We were planning something special."

Philadelphia attorney Aaron Freiwald filed suit April 25 in federal court, accusing five companies of decades of dumping toxic chemicals that made their way into groundwater and hushing up the magnitude of the problem.

The two surviving plaintiffs have oligodendroglioma, a rare disease that makes up less than 10 percent of primary brain tumors.

The companies named in the lawsuits are Rohm and Haas Chemicals LLC, Morton International, Huntsman, Huntsman Polyurethanes and Modine Manufacturing Co. Freiwald said May 4 that he was investigating five more possible brain-cancer cases among local residents.

A spokesman for Philadelphia-based Rohm and Haas, which owns Morton, said company officials felt bad for the plaintiffs in the case, but that their operations were not responsible. Spokesman Syd Havely said tests done on sample residential wells since 2000 had fallen within government limits, and that the area groundwater did not flow under McCullom Lake.

"We take these allegations very seriously and are very sympathetic to what these plaintiffs have, and these are very serious illnesses," Havely said. "But I have to say, though, that we see no link between the operations there and the illnesses these people have suffered from."

DiBlasi grew up in McHenry next to the lake in the 1960s and 1970s. He did not have well water, but stayed with many friends in McCullom Lake who did, and swam when the weather was warm.

Because his family had a history of heart problems, he exercised regularly and ate right, said DiBlasi, a gray brain-cancer survivor bracelet on his wrist and thick black hair covering the scar left when doctors dug into his left temporal lobe.

DiBlasi, now of Cary, spent Thursday applying for Social Security benefits – he no longer can work as a lien manager because he has trouble processing words, a function of the left brain hemisphere with the tumor.

The first thing I asked the doctor is, ‘Don’t take this personally, but what the [expletive] causes a brain tumor in a guy who’s 44 and in perfect health otherwise?’ " DiBlasi said, holding the doctor’s report.

DiBlasi outlived 42-year-old Susan Kalash, who traveled with her husband every weekend from Chicago to McCullom Lake to visit his parents. Kalash recalled that she liked to drink lots of water for health reasons.

For two years of their stay, Kalash said, his parents lived in the former home of Franklin Branham, the third plaintiff in the suit, who died in 2004 of glioblastoma. Kalash and his family also lived for several years in Ringwood, just south of the manufacturing plants.

Kalash has remarried but travels to his wife’s grave in Northlake almost every weekend during the summer. He long ago got rid of the bed they shared.

"I never again slept in that bed," Kalash said. "I told the kids that I’m not sleeping in that bed until mom comes home. She never came home."

Besides now having to worry about the health of his family still living, he has to ponder whether to join the class-action lawsuit that Freiwald filed on behalf of current and former McCullom Lake residents.

The lawsuit, besides mandating cleaning up the area, would require the companies to set up a fund to finance health screenings for residents. DiBlasi, who since has dedicated much of his time to increasing brain cancer awareness, said he favored such an idea.

"To me, that is what I would join [the lawsuit] for," DiBlasi said. "I don’t want to make money off of this. I’d want others to have the opportunity for early detection. MRIs aren’t cheap."

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