This morning as I was brushing my teeth, I couldn’t help but frown at my reflection in the mirror. “Ugh, my chin is still skewampus.”
Last November, I smacked my chin on a rock in a rather dramatic, downhill, high-speed running fall. A doctor who seemed rather hurried at 5 p.m. on a Friday evening assured me my jaw wasn’t broken, that it’s a tough bone to break, that it would hurt more if it was a real injury. Still, it hurt a lot, and to this day I’m not so sure. There’s still a bulge on the right side of my chin that becomes more obvious in certain light. Others don’t seem to notice it because it’s one of those minor changes in appearance that any of us would only notice about ourselves. But I swear my chin was not always this prominent. I think the bump may be what’s left of the hematoma that took weeks to stop hurting. But I do wonder. Will it ever go away?
I limped up the stairs, groaning because my right Achilles tendonitis has flared up again. My heel is particularly stiff and painful in the morning. This is my sixth season of Achilles pain; it first flared up during the summer of 2018. Strangely, this chronic issue only bothers me during the summer months. It’s such a mystery because my activity levels don’t meaningfully change from season to season. I used to blame it on a typically higher frequency of steep uphill hiking during summer, but now I’m not so sure. The most Achilles pain I’ve yet experienced flared up suddenly the week after my father died in June 2021. It couldn’t have come from exercise. I was largely sitting comatose in my Mom’s house, unable to process it all. The only thing that could even briefly distract me from the grief tearing my core apart from the inside was a painful pulsing in my right heel.
Perplexed about why this issue again returned in June, I wondered if this was sympathy pain — my nervous system associating that grief with tendonitis. Curious, I did some googling and landed on an interesting study that I spent most of the morning reading: “Allergy-induced systemic inflammation impairs tendon quality.” This all makes sense to me. My body is filled with inflammation — my autoimmune reactions to the sudden burst of summer pollen as well as my psychological responses to the difficult anniversary that’s approaching. It’s all interconnected.
I closed The Lacent and mindlessly clocked over to the New York Times — my typical coffee doom-scrolling includes seven different newspapers. This morning's headlines featured large-type, breathless coverage of the Canadian wildfires that are smothering most of the eastern half of the United States in smoke. “Large Swaths of North America Are Shrouded Under Unhealthy Air,” the headline announced. Zoo animals are being brought indoors and schoolchildren are being sent home early. At 2 p.m., the air quality index in the New York City region was 324 — the worst since the Environmental Protection Agency began recording air quality measurements in 1999.
I felt a shiver run down my back, because the last time I experienced an air quality index in the 320s, I had a severe asthma attack. It’s the only asthma attack I’ve had where I genuinely feared for my life. I was visiting my mom in Salt Lake City in August 2021. I was high on a mountain, 4,000 vertical feet above the valley, when a surprise plume of wildfire smoke blew in from the north on a cold front. The smell of campfire permeated the air, and visibility plummeted from a hundred miles to a hundred feet in seconds. I put on a Covid-era N95 mask and tightened a buff over my face, but my wheezing quickly became so pronounced that I couldn’t draw air into my lungs unless I was sitting still. I pondered whether my chances of survival were better if I waited it out in this terrible smoke plume or tried to hike back to safety. Neither seemed like a viable option. After about 10 minutes of sheer panic and self-reassurances, I was able to calm my airways enough to take in the oxygen I needed to hike. I got myself off the mountain, but damn, that was scary. I won’t ever go back there if there’s anything I can do to help it. If smoke fills the skies, I will stay indoors. Even if it’s smokey all summer long.
I’m privileged that I have that option. Practically all of Canada is on fire right now. We had a hefty dose of that smoke in Boulder in mid-May. I stayed indoors. I went to the gym to work out or rode my indoor bike trainer next to a roaring HEPA filter. I still felt wheezy and lightheaded, watching the indoor AQI hover around 100. Wildfire season is starting earlier, lasting longer, burning exponentially larger swaths of land, and choking the air with smoke for thousands of miles. It’s a tough future to ponder even on an individual level, let alone a global scale.
Another Substacker posted a note that rings so true I laughed out loud: “Remember: Your health is your responsibility. Be sure to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, walk 10,000 steps per day, and don’t live on the same continent as a wildfire.”
No, we don’t get to choose. I laughed again at the sad realization that this is a path we must all endure: Living in an increasingly broken body in an increasingly broken world.
In 1998, as a college freshman, I took an entry-level environmental science course at the University of Utah led by a quirky professor who insisted we call him Fred. Fred hand-wrote and illustrated the textbook we used, photocopying the pages and binding them in a spiral-ring book. His whimsical handwriting belied the starkness of the message he was conveying — ozone depletion, ocean acidification, and global warming. Fred warned us that environmental problems were likely to really start spiraling downward by the 2020s. I found great insight in Fred’s class and I believed him. And yet … the 2020s seemed so far away. I would be in my 40s by then. I had plenty of time to live a full, adventurous life before the shit really hit the fan.
Now the 2020s are here. My 40s don’t feel like the tail-end of my life. There may still be many more years of carrying my deteriorating body through this burning world. But is it so bad? The world isn’t broken, it’s a tough thing to break. It would hurt more if it was really falling apart.
But it does hurt, and I can’t help but wonder … will it ever go away?
I’ve experienced haunting orange sky in northern CA and yellow sky here in CO when the smoke is so thick, the mountains disappear. It’s awful but eventually does clear. I will never take blue sky for granted.
For your Achilles--you probably know this already--it helps to wear supportive cushioned slippers or slide-ons around the house instead of being barefoot, and a heel lift can make it feel better too when it flares, by shortening the tendon. Take care!
I wish I could express my sympathy, but you don't want pity. Please accept my concern, and agreement that you still have a long life to live as you have been. But, it's a steeper climb than before the asthma. Stay close to Beat. Peace and love to you Jill. Rich.