[ars]

It depends on how slowly you got the radiation.

The same dose delivered fast does much more damage than the dose delivered slowly.

At least that's the theory. The NRC works on the principle that the speed doesn't matter - it's just the cumulative that counts.

It's not a settled matter, although the research does seem to point in that direction.

[rosser]

>= ~5 Sv in an acute dose is generally fatal, but a man named Albert Stevens was injected with a small dose of plutonium in a human radiation experiment, and suffered a net dose of 64 Sv over a 21 year period before dying of heart disease. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens