The Man With The Radioactive Ass

Once upon a time, there was a welder in Peru.  He was welding pipes on a major hydroelectric project.  When projects that are that important you spend a few extra bucks to make sure that your pipes are decently manufactured and that you've made good welds.  The way you verify the quality of metal and the welds is with gamma ray spectroscopy.  If its thick metal, you need very high irradiance gamma sources...very radioactive.  

As you might guess, the pipes used in goddamn big dams are rather thick.  They are doubly important to verify the quality of because towns wash away if they fail.

Anyway, this welder finished a days work with the satisfaction of a job well done.  Running behind him was the radiography crew checking his welds giving him the thumbs up.  While walking away he saw something shiny on the ground.  It looked like a silver disc, like a coin that had been worn smooth.  Far be it from anyone to pass up silver.  So he picked it up...

And put it in his back pocket.

He then proceeded to take the long walk back down to town.  After an hour or so, his hip started to hurt like a son of a bitch.  Considering that he wasn't a teenager anymore and had been a laborer most his life, this was wasn't all that strange.  He got home, had dinner and tried to go to sleep but his leg hurt so much he couldn't sleep.

So he was awake when his co-worker the radiographer came to his house panicked asked if he'd seen a source because he couldn't account for one.  He reached in his back pocket and asked if that was the source.  The radiographer recoiled from it, ran out to his truck, and got the shielded case for the iridium-192 source.  He then took his welder friend to the hospital...

Whereupon, they amputated his leg and removed most of the right hip joint as it had been killed DEAD by a calculated 10,000R local exposure.

Thankfully, he didn't die, but he really wishes his co-worker had been a bit more careful with his sources.  His wife and kids were also exposed of course, but received a non-clinical dose.

The radiographer got his license pulled and because they reported promptly, no fines were levvied and no one went to jail.

Could be worse though.  In Iran, there was a welder that got exposed because the radiographer got imaptient and started irradiating the weld while he was still working on it.