The Spring of 1979 was momentous, full of buds of promise that were to blossom into a colorful, and yet unknown, future.  I was completing a three year residency in Family Medicine at Lancaster General and was expecting to begin my career as a family physician by working 3 years in Tanzania.  I had met Jill at LGH, who was one of the nurses at the hospital who helped to pioneer the new Intermediate Intensive Care Unit ( a unit made up of coed rooms of 4 beds each and one nurse, and patients who were not quite sick enough for the ICU but had the potential of being famously unstable).  Jill was beautiful and quick of wit, and surprisingly willing to accompany me to Africa.

We all had visions of Hiroshima in our heads

We planned to be married in June, with the small and intimate wedding to be held outdoors at Herrbrook Farm, where Jill was living, a place provided by Rod and Marylou Houser to offer a chance to live intentionally in community.

In the middle of all these plans and promises, we heard some chilling news about an accident at Three Mile Island on March 28th. The intensity of the news heated up day after day, as the significance of the event started to unfold on WITF and the pages of the Lancaster newspapers. It captured the headlines in the national news. None of us had a clue what an accident at a nuclear power plant could mean and how it might affect us. The news seem to unfold slowly before us. We would devour the paper and listen to the broadcasts, not quite getting enough to satisfy our hunger for more.

Two or three days into the event, talk of evacuation started gaining momentum and reaching a tipping point. This coincided with the revelation of “The Bubble”, something that we were to fear.  There was pressure building up inside the reactor, forming a bubble, and if this were to burst through the dome, there could be “a meltdown” and death and destruction would be released into the atmosphere!  We all had visions of Hiroshima in our heads and had to tamp down our anxiety in order to hear the details of the event as it was unfolding with calm and reason.

we did not want to be separated

People started to leave the area, planning to stay with family or friends. Evacuation routes were planned.  Water and food were being stockpiled in our homes. Information about how to survive nuclear fallout was being passed along by word of mouth.

Then Jill and I learned that in the evacuation plan, medical people were to be the last to leave. This meant we were to stay at our jobs at LGH throughout the worst of what was to come. We were young. We were brave. We would do this. But Jill remembers gazing at Lancaster from a hospital window, thinking “My parents are leaving. But I am here to stay, no matter what happens.”

Because of these trying times, I received special dispensation from the Houser’s to stay at Herrbrook with Jill.  In the event that this accident turns into a major catastrophe, we did not want to be separated.

The atmosphere in Lancaster County seemed surreal. There was lots of anxiety and many rumors about what was going to happen next.  We were on the edge of the abyss, waiting for any kind of news to guide us in what to do.

In some unbelievable, freakish quirk of fate, the movie China Syndrome was playing in theaters in Lancaster County during the very week of the accident at TMI.  Jane Fonda starred in this fictional story about an accident at a nuclear power facility that became rapidly very dangerous and threatened a “meltdown.”

We staggered out of the theater, with our hearts pounding and our eyes wide with speculation

It was Friday night, and after work I went to the bank and got out extra money in case this emergency turned into something desperate (there were no ATM’s), and Jill and I went to the local theater to watch The China Syndrome. The theater was entirely empty, except for 2 other anxious souls. The movie informed us that if a nuclear reaction was allowed to proceed unchecked, it could melt down into the earth (not really all the way to China). It would encounter the groundwater and a radioactive cloud of steam would be released into the atmosphere, “covering an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania!”  When that line was uttered by the nuclear scientist in the movie, our hearts found our throats. How could they have known that the accident was going to happen in our state….?

We staggered out of the theater, with our hearts pounding and our eyes wide with speculation. Is this going to happen to us?

We snuggled close to each other at Herrbrook and rode out the crisis, as President Jimmy Carter, who himself served on a nuclear sub, came to TMI and provided a calm and reassuring presence.

The details of how the crisis was resolved are now unclear to us. But somehow, all of the issues were addressed and The Bubble got deflated, as did our high alert. We went on to live our lives in peace, start our term in an African hospital, work in various settings in medicine thereafter, and return to Lancaster County in 1988. Jill has just retired from a 20 year career at Hospice and Community Care, and I continue to offer some snippets of time to Palliative Medicine at LGH, through hospice.

Last year, however, we relived the TMI crisis by watching The China Syndrome  on Netflix. It was almost too much!