THREAD.

I want to preface this post by acknowledging the magnitude of Chernobyl. It was and is the world’s biggest nuclear disaster. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people and affected the lives of millions.

It’s an event that reverberated, and continues to do so, so much so that the scale of it is impossible to comprehend. Today is 35 years since it happened. This is a personal, small reflection from me.

I remember staying in an Airbnb in Copenhagen on book tour two years ago. Mr M was with me and in the evenings we were watching the HBO series Chernobyl. I’d avoided it for a while, but we sat watching it in the dark, and I could feel anger filling every inch of my body.

Anger I didn’t and don’t know what to do with; a fizzing energy that made me feel ill. I was born eight months and three weeks after Chernobyl, eighteen hundred miles away in a small town in the northeast of England.

You would think that that would be far away enough not to matter, but you would be wrong. Radioactive rain swept across Europe, and in the following few years the number of babies born with limb differences in the UK (particularly in the north-east of England & Wales) increased.

I was born with missing bones in my hands, my remaining fingers fused together. I didn’t have tear ducts, and every epithelial cell in my body was and is affected.

It means the linings of my organs are different, it means in the last few years I’ve lost my hair, it means I’m in the process now of losing my eyesight, having had dozens of operations as a child to build my hands, and having spent my life in and out of hospital.

How strange to be born in a place halfway around the world from some man-made disaster, and have that programmed into my DNA. My brain can’t grapple with it.

I remember watching an interview with Michael Berryman, an actor who also has a form of ectodermal dysplasia — he was talking about the disassociation he felt with Hiroshima, a place where his father had been during that nuclear disaster

and why he was subsequently born with the same condition as me. The world is a strange place. It makes my head fill up with noise.

I’m trying to find ways to write about it. I can’t think of a neat way to end this post, but it’s something I want to share. xxxx

PS I’m aware that this is getting shared a lot. If you don’t already know me and you would like to know more about who I am (not just this piece of information about me/this one Twitter thread), you can find me online here: http://www.YouTube.com/jenvcampbell  & I have written many books. x