Du Page County already carries the dubious distinction of having the state’s largest sick building: the $53 million county courthouse in Wheaton.
Now, the county may have the most ironic: Hinsdale Hospital.
The three-story, red brick Elmwood Hall is not inside the hospital. It is connected to the main building by a walkway and it includes physicians’ offices and a laboratory.
Administrators are not conceding the hall is “sick,” saying that air-quality tests have shown low levels of airborne volatile compounds.
But plenty of employees say they are certain Elmwood Hall is to blame for their illnesses.
“I have never felt so sick,” said Sharon Lawrence, who has worked in Elmwood Hall for five years. Burning in her sinuses and ears became so intense Tuesday that Lawrence went to the hospital’s emergency room for treatment.
“You feel like you have absolutely no control over what’s happening to you,” she said. “I have lost complete control of what’s happening to my body.”
Lawrence, an insurance billing clerk, is among seven employees at Elmwood Hall who have filed reports with hospital administrators outlining what they believe are building-related illnesses, including dizziness, nausea, ear aches, laryngitis, and burning sinuses and throats.
But employees say the number of colleagues afflicted by the building’s bad air is closer to 25. An estimated 60 people work in Elmwood Hall and at least one filed a formal complaint in April with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which prompted the agency to request that Hinsdale Hospital respond to the employees’ concerns.
Lawrence’s former colleague Paula Wilson, who transferred from the same third-floor department in May after experiencing similar maladies, said she recorded the names of 23 people who were suffering dizziness or sinus problems.
Many of the employees say they believe the source of the problem is fumes from a hospital laboratory on Elmwood’s first floor. Employees experiencing the most severe symptoms work in a third-floor billing department that was created from a storage area in 1990.
“Statistically, I don’t know how a reasonable person could sit there and say there isn’t a problem with this building,” said Wilson, who added that she did not contact the U.S. health administration.
Hospital administrators contend the building is safe and the vast majority of employees are working comfortably. The hospital paid a Mt. Prospect firm, TurnKey Environmental Consultants Inc., $8,000 to test the building’s air quality in April. Results showed levels of airborne dusts and volatile compounds were below maximums set by the U.S. health administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
In addition to ordering the air-quality tests, hospital administrators have changed air filters in the ventilation system, added exhaust fans in third-floor bathrooms and increased air flow through the building, said vice president of personnel Herb Hill.
The hospital also sent results of the TurnKey test to a second air-quality expert for review, Hill said. He is waiting for those results and a final report from the U.S. health administration.
“We’re doing everything that seems responsible to make the work environment as safe and as pleasing as possible,” Hill said. “There’s no question that these folks are having difficulties. Yet at this point, we can’t pinpoint that the building is the fault of that.”
Lawrence, Wilson and other employees say the testing was done after the ventilation system was cleaned and windows were opened. In addition, employees contend testing equipment was placed in the building for less than a full work day.
Hill placed responsibility for the testing on TurnKey.
“We weren’t hiding anything from anybody,” Hill said. “We didn’t tell them how to do the tests. It wasn’t like we were trying to somehow change the testing process to get a predicted outcome.”
Lawrence and Wilson are perhaps the two most extreme cases of Elmwood employees who have suffered health problems. Both have filed claims with the Illinois Industrial Commission seeking financial compensation from the hospital.
Lawrence, 50, works in the third-floor converted storage area. She said she began detecting “sewer” odors and noxious fumes, which she believes flowed from the lab in 1990 and 1991.
She started suffering ear aches and dizziness and losing her voice. An ear specialist failed to find the source but the pain continued, leading to her hospitalization and extensive testing in Hinsdale for nine days in June 1992, she said.
In December 1992, Lawrence contracted a sinus infection and in January, she returned to a specialist, who found a white spot near her cheek bone. Originally thought to be a tooth-like substance, the material was removed by surgeons and found to be part of tissue that is deteriorating her cheekbone, she said. Doctors told her the condition, known as chronic sclerosing osteomyelitis, was caused by an airborne virus, she said.
Since June 1992, Lawrence said she has taken eight weeks of sick leave.
“I look at myself and think, `Man, have I aged,’ ” Lawrence said. “I can’t believe it’s me. I’ve got a face that doesn’t look like me anymore. I’m so angry inside. I’m just getting to the point where enough is enough.”
But she and others have said they won’t quit.
“I don’t want to leave the job that I like,” she said, adding that she would have difficulty obtaining medical coverage with a new employer, who likely would decline to provide insurance coverage for a pre-existing medical condition.
“We want to continue working, but we have a right to breathe clean air,” she said. “We have a right to feel healthy.”
Wilson, 27, was pregnant in June 1992 when she began suffering severe headaches, dizziness and nausea, she said. She said she believed her pregnancy was the source of the disorders, even when she went into labor 12 weeks early, she said.
After stopping the early labor, doctors ordered her to two weeks of bed rest. She returned to work part time, delivered her son, Alex, three weeks early and returned to work in October.
Her health problems continued and, in January, she nearly fainted in her chair, she said. During the next three months, she visited several doctors who gave faulty diagnoses or were unable to determine the source of her problems, she said.
She took sick days, only to return to work and become ill, she said.
In March, a handful of employees filed reports with health administrators at the hospital, prompting officials to recommend that Wilson and Lawrence be examined by Dr. Peter Orris, a specialist in occupational medicine.
His letter to hospital employee health coordinator Maureen Sherlock stated symptoms in Wilson and Lawrence “are quite consistent with exposure to organic solvents of various sorts often used in laboratories.”
Orris discouraged the hospital from spending time and money identifying specific exposure levels. Instead, he recommended “to proceed immediately toward cost-effective remediation.”
Wilson said her health has “greatly improved” since she was transferred from Elmwood to another hospital building, adding that two colleagues who also transferred have experienced similar recoveries.
Elmwood Hall is the fourth building in Kane and Du Page Counties where occupants have complained of ills thought to be brought on by the structures’ faulty ventilation.
The most notorious is the new county courthouse, closed from September 1992 to April 1993 while workers performed an estimated $3 million worth of improvements after more than 400 employees sought treatment for illnesses they attributed to the building. An estimated 20 have sought medical treatment since the courthouse reopened.
Also, Hinsdale Elementary School District 181 is spending nearly $200,000 to correct the ventilation system at Hinsdale Middle School, where in the last year pupils have complained of respiratory problems, headaches and sleepiness.
In addition, students and staff at St. Charles High School have been complaining of health problems reportedly caused by excess carbon dioxide in the building. An environmental testing service has collected air samples throughout the building and is expected to offer its findings by mid-June.
