How Families Discover Latent Illnesses Linked to Asbestos Exposure
Your father began coughing in the spring of March. He would pause on the steps to catch his breath during the summer months. It could have been due to his age, the smoking habit that he gave up in 1994, or maybe it was from the muggy weather. No one brought up his years in the boiler room in the 1970s. Because no one was thinking about it.
This is typical of asbestos-related illnesses. They take many years to surface, and most of the time no one thinks of their past jobs when they have a symptom. When someone has an illness caused by asbestos, it takes time to show. Each month that you spend trying to find out why your loved one is sick is a month you could be receiving treatment. You may also lose your chance of filing a claim.
Here is some information on why asbestos diseases take so long to appear, what symptoms you may notice in your family member, finding out if they were exposed to asbestos on the job, and what to do when you know. Our Illinois mesothelioma lawyers see this situation every week.
Why Asbestos Takes Decades to Make Anyone Sick
Asbestos fibers are small enough to breathe in and tough enough that the body can’t break them down. Once they lodge in the lining of the lungs or the abdomen, they stay, and the irritation they cause works slowly. Scarring builds over years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the mesothelioma latency period at 20 to 40 years from first exposure and has documented cases as long as 71 years.
Think about what that means inside a family. A man who fitted pipe in 1978 retired in 2005. He moved twice, buried his wife, and started picking up grandkids from school. The exposure happened to a version of him that nobody in the house remembers, and often he doesn’t either, because the products were ordinary and nobody at the plant said the word ‘asbestos’ out loud.
You can’t blame the family for coming up with more handy explanations once this former pipe fitter starts showing symptoms.
What Families Notice First, and What It Gets Blamed On
The early asbestos disease symptoms are unremarkable on their own. The National Cancer Institute lists among them:
- Difficulty breathing
- Coughing
- Pain under the rib cage
- Pain or swelling in the abdomen
- Unexplained weight loss
- Fatigue
The National Cancer Institute notes that every one of these symptoms can come from other conditions. In a 74-year-old, all of them do. The cough is allergies. The weight loss, finally, is seen as a good thing. The breathlessness? That’s just age.
What separates asbestos disease from more ordinary ailments is persistence. The cough doesn’t clear with antibiotic. The breathlessness gets a little worse every month instead of coming and going. Sometimes the first clue isn’t a symptom at all, but a chest X-ray taken for something else that shows the lining of the lung has thickened or that fluid has collected around it. Pleural thickening is an asbestos signature. A doctor who knows the patient’s work history will read it that way.
The family’s real responsibility at this stage is to tell the doctor about the pipe fitting, or the boiler room, or the years the man worked at a plant that closed down decades ago.
The Detective Work: Tracing an Illness Back to a Job
The doctor asks whether the patient was ever exposed to asbestos, and the honest answer is often “I don’t think so.” Asbestos was in pipe insulation, gaskets, brake linings, cement, floor tile and joint compound. The workers who handled it were rarely told. So, the family becomes the investigator. What did Dad do between 1965 and 1985? Who did he work for, and what was in the building?
The trades tell you most of it. Insulators, pipe fitters, boilermakers, millwrights, electricians, bricklayers, laborers, and auto mechanics carry the highest risk, and north central Illinois had plenty of the work that went with them:
- Zinc smelting in LaSalle
- Cement in Oglesby
- Coal under Bureau and LaSalle Counties
- Glass in Peru
- Rail yards and river barges along the Illinois
Next, ask a hard question. Who shook out and laundered his coveralls? Secondary asbestos exposure risks are real, and they fall on the spouse who did the laundry and the kids who met him at the door. A federal report to Congress documented disease and death among workers’ families from contamination carried home, and Illinois courts have allowed family members to pursue those claims when the company should have seen the danger.
What to Do Once the Picture Comes Into Focus
Get the diagnosis in writing, along with the imaging and pathology reports behind it.
Write down the work history while the person who lived it can still tell it, with employers, job sites, years, and the names of coworkers. Keep every record that backs it up, from old pay stubs and union cards to a Social Security earnings history.
Then talk to a lawyer before you talk to anyone else. Illinois generally allows two years from the date of diagnosis to file, and because since 2019 Illinois law has allowed workers to sue an employer directly when the workers’ compensation deadline ran out decades ago.
Families sometimes wait because the exposure seems too old to matter. The law expects it to be old. That is the whole reason the discovery rule exists.
Schweickert Ganassin Krzak Rundio, LLP Helps Illinois Families Connect the Dots
A parent gets sick, the explanations run out, and a job from another lifetime turns out to be the answer. Our firm has served north central Illinois for more than 40 years from offices in Peru, Ottawa, Morris and Chicago. We handle mesothelioma and asbestos cases on a contingency basis, meaning you owe nothing unless we recover for you. We’ll come to the house or the hospital if getting to an office is one more thing your family can’t manage right now.
If someone you love has a diagnosis that doesn’t add up, reach out to our firm for a free consultation. The exposure might be 40 years old, but your options aren’t gone yet.
