Chemo drugs may be killing health workers

Sue Crump braced as the chemo drugs dripped into her body. She knew treatment would be rough. She had seen its signature countless times in the ravaged bodies and hopeful faces of cancer patients in hospitals where she had spent 23 years mixing chemo as a pharmacist. At the same time, though, she wondered whether those same drugs–experienced as a form of "secondhand chemo" while she mixed the drugs as a pharmacist at Swedish Medical Center and elsewhere–may have caused her cancer to begin with. Chemo is poison, by design. It's descended from deadly mustard gas first used against soldiers in World War I. Crump knew she had her own war on her hands. She wanted to live long enough to see her 21-year-old daughter, Chelsea, graduate college. And she wanted something else: She wanted young pharmacists and nurses to pay attention to her story.