They went into the mines to secure a better life for their loved ones. Unfortunately, they emerged with ravaged lungs and damaged psyches.
“I’ve loaded more coal in my sleep than I have in the mines,” says Terry Lilly. The words don’t come easy. Though retired, Lilly remains ever a coal miner. It’s said coal miners are a stoic sort. Inner revelations aren’t in Lilly’s nature. But it’s also physically difficult for him to share those words.
Black lung has seen to that. Lilly went underground in 1975, at 18. Thirty years in, shortly after returning from hernia surgery, he was buried in a collapse. “I broke a leg, both knees, a hip, my back. And while I was in the hospital, I had blood clots go through my lungs. I lay in ICU for 18 days. Should have died.”
Meanwhile, a physical had revealed spots on his lungs. He was initially misdiagnosed, as so many coal miners are, with lung cancer. After a biopsy at the University of Virginia, a doctor stepped into the waiting room and asked Lilly’s wife, “Ma’am, did your husband work in a dusty environment?” “She said, ‘Yeah; he worked in the coal mines for 30 years.’ ‘That’s your problem,’” the doc said. Black lung.
“Listen, these hands are as handy as they can be,” Lilly says. He’d spent a lifetime tinkering, tilling, restoring automobiles. But simple chores grew incrementally more difficult, and with that a deep-seated despair crept in, compounded by a tragedy.
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