An Asbestos and Mesothelioma Statistic

It's 4.45 in the morning, pitch black outside. The alarm clock goes off - the most hated sound at the start of the day. He hits it out, half asleep. Trying to get out of the oh-so-comfortable slumber, all he can think of is how he's going to need a bit more time to get up. 5 minutes, tops! A minute later, a second alarm goes off, tearing him out of his inertia all over again. Sensing it's going to be futile to continue fighting his time, he surrenders to his time-keeper & slowly rolls out of bed.

His wife dozes peacefully, he glances at her a moment - they have been married since high school & he's in still in love with her. Through the painful times, when their world seemed to collapse, he learned to love her even more. He's grateful for having her in his life, but hardly acknowledges it. A tired smirk grows out of the corner of his mouth as he gets up, goes to the bathroom & gets ready.

Half an hour later, he fetches his lunch box from the kitchen, grabs his gear & locks the door as he leaves his home. 'I hope that crazy leakage finally gets fixed today!' he thinks, as he hops into his truck, backs out the driveway & heads to work. A pipeline burst at one of the shafts near the lift, flooding the central area at the top. Getting in & out of the mine has since become a pain. He's been supervising at an asbestos mine, at mid-managerial level, just shy of 13 years now. He's been working in it, overall, for 30 years.

The time is now 6.00 am & he's just arriving outside. As he puts his hard hat on & walks towards the mine, his foreman meets him, sarcastically jokes about how he didn't get any last night again, then briefs him about the day. He takes a look at the roster, sifting through the pages of the activity log. 'Tunnel 6 approaching 80% completion'

'Whoa! If the guys keep it up at this rate browse around this website, we'll complete the project 6 weeks in advance.' he thinks to himself. 'Way to go, boys!'

Before he walks up the stairs to his office behind the main entrance, he looks over to his left & notices something he's not happy about at all. The central area is still flooded up & now leaking down the lift.

'Those contractors are in for it!'

Inside his office, he drops his gear in the closet, sinks into his office chair & begins collating last week's records on tunnel 5's output. He's been leading all project management since he was a foreman & despite his vast experience & nearly unblemished track record over his career, he still gets nervous whenever he's running a project. It's the same butterflies in his tummy he hasn't been able to get rid of, over the years. They've probably been responsible for his high performance, he reckons, so he's not particularly bothered.

3 minutes go by & a tiny heap of reports have already piled up in front of him, on his heavily, document-littered desk; he still needs a few more before he meets up with his team, then phone the agency to break hell on the lousy contractors. Pictures of his daughter, when she was a child, hang behind him, on the wall. Portraits of his wife & son pose beside him. How time flies! Just yesterday, it seemed, he was throwing his daughter up in the air, as she always loved; now she's about to graduate from college, with a major in cybernetic engineering & $23,000 debts. And his son, now a freshman on full scholarship at a leading private university, doesn't stop calling & texting about the girl he's newly fallen for, whom he's this time convinced is the one.