Re: That dirty yard in the neighbourhood
I doubt she would have been cancer-free having plutonium against her neck since 1957.
When I was six or seven, I was bought my first wristwatch - a Timex if I remember correctly - which had each hour marker, and all three hands (hour, minute and second) painted in Radium paint to glow in the dark.
A few years later, in a school physics lab, we were introduced to a Geiger counter, which registered my watch quite strongly!
I had been wearing all that radioactive goodness every day for a number of years, as I'm sure many other people of my generation will have done.