Oh, I forgot to mention that my story was happening in Moscow. Radiation safety rules there are… unusual. You get slapped for handling a thorium chunk in an explicitly hot environmental lab outside of fume hood, then dump ion exchange resin flush down the drain. You get strict access control in Kurchatov institute with weeks prior to entry to submit documents just to get to a meeting room, but then the same area has radioactive waste dumped between the trees in forested area (yes, it’s in center of the city with many times more people than my whole country).

And then it’s regular ALARA. For that girl, that is, screw them those bystanders on the train. Clearly the fancy hospital with all that gear was one of those damned places where government and oligarchs get patched up and regular people are only experimental test samples, and they made no secret out of that.