Stories

I grew up in Otsego, pretty much right downtown on Kalamazoo Street, from 1973 to 1991—so, my whole childhood—and then I left for college. I've been out on the west coast for 25 years now, but my mom still lives in the Otsego area in Cooper Township, so I still kind of stay in the loop with what's going on. I usually come home a couple times a year to see her, and always at Christmas. I wouldn't say I have a super close relationship with most of the people I went to high school with, but you follow along on Facebook, and I definitely noticed a couple classmates that were passing away remarkably young with what seemed like very rare and odd cancers and things like that.  

Soon, I started paying attention to Mary Zack. With my academic background—I have a master's degree in public administration—I’m very interested in environmental justice and nonprofits, and her campaign piqued my interest. She was talking about Otsego, a small blue-collar town where a lot of people don’t have great health insurance, being polluted.

I remember the mills being a huge part of town that you could always kind of smell. Looking back, they were just a daily part of life that you didn’t think much about. Mary Zack’s work definitely made me think. I haven’t seen too many of the health surveys they did, but the little bits I’ve seen are just completely insane with the levels of cancer and illness.  

Then I'd say, personally, I got most interested because almost exactly two years ago I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Maybe a year or six months before my diagnosis, I had some tiredness, but I mean, nothing major. I was in my late 40s at the time, so everybody's tired! I went for my yearly checkup, and I saw a doctor I don't normally see. She was a partner of my PCP and she did a neck check and found a little something. She said, “I don't know, I can't really tell, but let's check just in case.” I’m very grateful for that because I think a lot of people would have just overlooked it. That was July of 2023. Then I went through the whole process of ultrasound, biopsy, MRI, and then I ended up having surgery in October.  

Luckily, it's definitely one of those situations where they caught it really early. Thyroid cancer in general is very slow moving, so even though I have endless tales I can tell about medical care I've received, overall, it was okay. When I said I wanted to take the whole thyroid out (because they said they could take half or they could take the whole thing), I told them I just feel like whether in Otsego or around here, there are so many people I know with cancer at this age. I don't want to do this again. So, I decided to have the whole thing removed. The doctor, my surgeon, was really pushing back, saying I should really keep part of it because it'll help deal with the aftereffects. But I told him I didn’t want to have the surgery twice, forget it. Turns out, after they got my results, that it was a more aggressive form than they thought, so they would have had to take the whole thing out anyway.

I focused on genetic causes and had testing done, though it all came back clear. I have a lot of cancer in my family that I think now was possibly due to environmental exposure as well. My one grandma had breast cancer twice, my other grandma had ovarian cancer, and they both worked in canneries in the Muskegon area. My mom has Addison's disease, which is a fairly rare adrenal gland deficiency she was diagnosed with in the late 70s after she had lived in Otsego for probably about ten years. She also had her thyroid removed because of Graves' disease. I have a sister, and she so far has had no weird health issues, so she's the lucky one right now.

Now, I definitely believe that there's a link, an environmental link. Just look back at just the stories. Look at Mary and her family. Mary had ovarian cancer when she was 18 or something. It's completely insane to me that three of her family members had breast cancer without any genetic link. That's bonkers.  

We do have close family friends that still live in Plainwell, and they've been going through drinking only filtered water or drinking bottled water. I think they just got their filter finally repaired. I started hearing about people testing for PFAS and hearing it directly from people that I know and that I'm close to; that was a little scary, too. It makes me very disappointed in those companies. I'm assuming there's not really much accountability or any type of acceptance of what has happened with pollution in Otsego. I have not been following things closely, but I'm assuming that's not a piece that's happening readily.