Words cannot express ...

... how horrifying this extremely well-documented article is.

Yesterday while talking to Liz, I said that Bush had managed something that Nixon, Clinton, Reagan, , never did, namely make me embarrassed to be an American. It seems like every day there's a new parallel to draw between Bush & Hitler, between Bush's faux "democracy" and fascism. It's awful, it's scary. But though I bellyache & moan about how awful it is, I have never had to deal with anything like this:

Captain Terry Riordon unknowingly brought radiation poisoning home with him from Iraq to his wife, Susan Riordon. As recounted in the November, 2004 issue of the mainstream Conde Nast publication Vanity Fair, Mrs. Riordon was constantly burned by her husband's semen during intercourse.

Seems Terry's semen was turned to a fiery alkali by the radioactive uranium that settled in his testicles. The happily married couple had no idea what this new and horrifying complication was in this intensely private part of their life together. Little did they know the American Department of Defense had hopped into bed with them with a deadly intent.

With her husband slowly dying of radiation poisoning and in intense pain herself, Mrs. Riordon resorted to filling condoms with frozen green peas to use on herself to obtain relief from the internal burning's intense, excruciating, lasting pain. Other couples do that and other wildly frantic and imaginative measures seeking relief. The burning can leave blisters and contamination.

"It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire," Riordon says. "It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell." In a last, desperate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, "I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant." That, she says, made her pain just about bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent. "And that was like our last little intimacy gone."