Arivaca woman lives in darkness

Various radiations can harm her, she says

Arivaca is in a somewhat remote part of Arizona, 11 miles north of the Mexican border, 17 miles west of Tumac‘cori and surrounded by rocky mountains and hills and sparse desert landscape.

After recent monsoons, grass and weeds are green and ankle high or higher, giving good cover to snakes, rabbits and lizards.

Arivaca resident G’ana Dispigno doesn’t get to enjoy the verdant desert.

She’s housebound by severe reactions to light and other kinds of radiation.

It’s been this way at least 20 years, and it’s getting worse.

Family and friends have wrapped the small trailer she calls home in various layers of light-preventing fabric and aluminum screening to help keep the radiation outside.

She goes out, if at all, on the darkest nights

And she has got a new concern, the Border Patrol’s infrared towers searching for illegal aliens.

She fears the radiation will be so strong it will further aggravate her condition.

Some of the new towers are already in place and the rest will be added soon.

G’ana has a phone, but no television and radio.

“I used to love “Prairie Home Companion,” on the radio, she recalled.

But no more.

She takes at least 40 medications a day, most of them pills. She has to count them carefully to make sure she’s following her physician’s regimen.

Her physician, Dr. Gabriel Cousens of Patagonia’s Tree of Life Health Practice, recently wrote that the infrared towers are “life threatening.”

He said, “She must live where she is not affected by the towers if she is not to get sicker.”

His letter, written March 16, 2008, said she’s “seriously ill, housebound, disabled with mixed multiple connective tissue diseases, including Systemic Lupus, Scleroderma, Sjogrens and Rheumatoid Arthritis.”

Also she can’t live where the temperature falls below 90 degrees, so her home has to be heated most of the year.

Cousens said if she is exposed to various radiations, they exacerbate her conditions, including hemorrhaging.

In a telephone interview Dispigno said she has suffered some unexpected bleeding through parts of her skin.

She previously lived in Connecticut and has a physician’s report from there that traces the onset. At first she didn’t believe the radiation was the cause of her discomfort, but as it increased she sought more and more treatment.

Dispigno’s daughter, Mistina O’Neil, and family live in Tucson, and were vacationing in California when this article was written and unavailable for an interview.

Mrs. O’Neil did write once that her mother is homebound “with complications of Lupus and Mixed Connective Tissue Disease.”

“She still loves horses, animals, children, dancing, singing, riding, nature” and other activities, said the daughter.

On Dispigno’s back porch, which is shielded to help keep out radiation, her cat Gracie and bob-tailed dog Treashy hang out hoping for snacks and contact with visitors.

Friends who deliver groceries leave them inside the darkened porch. She said, since 1992, they’ve been delivered by Keith Bagwell, former newspaper reporter and now a Pima County employee.

jlamb@gvnews.com | 547-9749