Glenn Abatemarco got sick two weeks after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and he has not fully recovered his ability to breathe normally.
That in itself is not unusual. A lot of people in Lower Manhattan who were exposed to the acrid dust and smoke from Ground Zero developed the persistent lung irritation known as World Trade Center Cough. But Abatemarco, 41, does not fit the pattern, and therein lies a medical mystery.
First, he lives in Brooklyn, miles from Ground Zero, and works in midtown Manhattan, where he is a vice president at a financial services company. He had no intense exposure to the dust cloud from the towers’ collapse and no chronic exposure afterward. But he got sick anyway, and he did not get well. The only explanation his doctors have been able to come up with — after three trips to the emergency room, a CT scan, a battery of allergy tests, dozens of days of lost work and a six-week exile in Arizona last fall to try a desert cure — is the date his symptoms began. Houston Chronicle
Is it just because I’m a mental health practitioner, or is it odd that the article doesn’t even mention the possibility that these ‘outliers’ have a psychosomatic ailment?
