Monica Evans is a freelance writer based in Raglan, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Breathe in. Pause. Now — the tricky part — out. You trail off halfway through into a high-pitched wheeze. In again. Angle your body to make it easier. Concentrate. Surely, it’s not this hard. Babies can do it. Jellyfish do it without brains. Out. Grab the inhaler again; suck in the medicine. Hold it until your pulse thuds in your head. Out. Wheeze. Gasp. Cough.
WAIKATO, New Zealand — It’s November and the weather is weird. The air is sweaty, the sky is bruising to indigo and the wind is whipping up dust. It’s springtime, but it smells fruity and dense — like the hot late-summer storms that roll here regularly from the Pacific Islands. I’m driving from my home in rural Raglan to the city of Hamilton to get some better asthma meds, but my fingers and toes are tingling, and the corners of my vision are going dark.
I pull over on a side road just before the “divvy,” a hill that marks the halfway point, where the road curls around cliffs and there’s no safe place to stop. It’s an overtaking zone and cars whoosh past beeping. I think about flagging someone down — I’m scared I’ll pass out, scared to be alone — but I feel hesitant about pulling a stranger into my crisis. I call 111 and wait for the ambulance instead.
Storms & Flowers
Weird weather is just about everywhere now. Floods, storms, wildfires and droughts come quicker and harder. Hibernating animals wake up at odd times; migratory ones get lost. People are moving their homes to higher ground as coastlines crumble and riverbanks burst.
Inside my body, a more intimate climate-related disaster appears to be unfolding. I’ll explain. The Waikato is wide, flat and green: dairy country rimmed by ranges and ocean. Lolium perenne, a type of ryegrass, is one of the main pasture crops grown here: a tall, tough colonizer from temperate Europe. At my place in springtime, it grows supple and silver on the steep bank beside the outdoor bath, flowering in November and then dying back before the heat peaks in late summer, fawn-brown and crisp. That’s when the tropical storms tend to arrive. But the rhythms are changing. Events that used to syncopate are now in sync.
Lately, these storms and flower blooms have collided. And when they do, something strange sometimes happens. The storm’s warm updrafts suck the ryegrass pollen into its thunderclouds, smashing it into smaller pieces. Cold downdrafts then drag these finer pollen particles downward and outward.
In places with high populations, this phenomenon can cause a very particular kind of emergency. That’s because a lot of people are allergic to ryegrass, but many of us — myself included — aren’t aware of it unless we take an allergy test that involves pricking skin with the allergen in question and waiting for a red circle and an itch.
Ryegrass pollen particles are relatively large: about 25 to 30 microns, or thousandths-of-a-millimeter — up to 10 times the size of other pollen types. When we breathe them in, they stick to mucus in our noses and throats, sometimes prompting sneezes and snot. But when those particles are smashed down to smaller than ten microns — as happens after some thunderstorms — they can travel deep into our lungs, causing inflammation and constriction, or symptoms of asthma, including in people who’ve never experienced it before.
All In My Head?
The ambos arrive, all calm efficiency and fluoro vests. They walk me to their vehicle and sit me down on a gurney for checks. Turns out I went to high school with one of them. I’m kind of embarrassed, especially when the oximeter shows I’m getting plenty of oxygen; it makes me wonder if I’m just freaking myself out and making it up.
I get the sense the ambos are thinking something similar. When I tell them I’ve been home alone with the kids all weekend because my partner is away up the coast, I notice their meaningful looks. One tries to get me to do “box breathing,” a meditation technique. I like meditation techniques as much as the next millennial, but I feel infuriated. Lots of people have told me over the years that I can will my way out of asthma or heal it with herbs. I’ve tried plenty of things, but none of them work as well as the red, plastic, greenhouse-gas-emitting inhalers.
“Lately, these storms and flower blooms have collided. And when they do, something strange sometimes happens.”
I sit on the shaking gurney as the ambulance trundles over the divvy, leaning forward against the rough seatbelt. What’s wrong with me? I think about the life insurance application languishing on my laptop and wish I’d submitted it already. Mostly, though, my brain is taken up with breath.
Crisis & Care
The wait in Waikato Hospital’s emergency department is predictably long. Two hours in, my partner arrives, brow furrowed with worry, having hurtled down the highway with a friend who dropped him off so he could join me in the hospital. I lie down beside him on the lumpy bank of plastic chairs, tuck up my legs and rest my shins against the side of his body. I feel his skin’s warmth, his steady breathing that I, eventually, begin to match. I’m surprised that what comforts me is so subtle.
When I finally get a bed in the emergency room, there’s an older couple in the space across from us. We start chatting as my breath returns, and they tell us they’ve been together 45 years. She’s a keen gardener, back at the hospital for checks after a heart operation last week, apologetic for all the fuss. He’s a volunteer firefighter, firm in his love and concern. Got her out of the garden as soon as she started feeling funny and told her he’d packed her stuff.
The firefighter gives us a ride home later that night. Steering the truck back over the divvy, he tells us about what it’s like being part of the local fire brigade. Just like in the small town I grew up in, his team ends up dealing with all kinds of non-fire emergencies: car crashes, suicides, swimmers swept out to sea. Nowadays, when the siren starts to whine across the harbor, the volunteers all get a text telling them what kind of emergency it is, so they can choose whether to come and help or not. He doesn’t check it though, just stops what he’s doing and gets in the car.
Melbourne’s Perfect Storm
North of Melbourne, Australia is a vast expanse of flat, dry farmland that gradually dissipates into desert. My mum grew up there, on a farm about 186 miles from the city, where her parents grew rice and raised sheep, and her hay fever-prone sister shut herself inside during springtime to stop sneezing.
On Nov. 21, 2016, strong, humid northerly winds pounded Melbourne, carrying a heavy load of ryegrass pollen. Paul Beggs, an environmental health scientist at Sydney’s Macquarie University, spoke to first responders and emergency doctors on call that day: “Some of them said they knew it was going to be a bad asthma day, even before the thunderstorm occurred,” he told me. “But no one guessed it was going to be as problematic as it was.”
In the late afternoon, thunderstorms began to develop, moving east toward Melbourne. As soon as they passed over the city of roughly 4 million people, many began struggling to breathe. There weren’t enough ambulances or space in hospital ERs, and pharmacies had queues of wheezing customers to deal with, too. Over the following 30 hours, 3,365 people arrived at emergency departments in the area with acute respiratory symptoms, 476 were admitted to the hospital with breathing problems, 35 to the intensive care, and 10 died. Most had never been diagnosed with asthma but had experienced asthma symptoms before.
In the moment, there wasn’t much time to think about what was happening. Medical staff “were very much working in the dark at the time in terms of knowing what the cause was,” said Beggs. “They were simply focused on trying to deal with this massive influx of people.” It wasn’t until the (allergenic) dust had settled that people put things together and realized that it was a massive thunderstorm asthma event.
Beggs has since written about how climate change could make what happened in Melbourne more common: For many plants, the pollen season is getting longer, so it’s increasingly likely that a high-pollen day will coincide with the “right” kind of thunderstorm. And, as carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, many plants are producing more pollen than they used to — some of which seems to elicit a greater allergic response. Several grass species are shifting their ranges, marching further toward the poles as temperatures rise. Meanwhile, thunderstorms are getting more intense and frequent, and coming at unusual times. A “perfect storm” is too easy an analogy for what happens next.
“As carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, many plants are producing more pollen than they used to — some of which seems to elicit a greater allergic response.”
An ‘Odd’ Day In The Waikato ER
In early 2017, some New Zealand health researchers flew “across the ditch” for a conference in Australia, where several scientists who’d studied the Melbourne event spoke. “We could see how it had really given them a fright,” said Carol Stewart, a disaster environmental health specialist at New Zealand’s Massey University. “Not only because of the event but also because of how it overwhelmed the first responder system.” It was as big for them, she said, as the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 were for New Zealanders. “I’d never actually heard of [thunderstorm asthma] before then, but it made a big impression.”
Stewart and her colleagues began thinking about what parts of New Zealand might be most vulnerable, and the Waikato, with its wide stretches of pasture, was top of the list. On December 2 of that same year, a humid thunderstorm hit Hamilton and their suspicions bore out. Cat Chang, a consultant respiratory physician at Waikato Hospital, was on the wards the next morning and noticed a higher-than-normal number of people admitted with asthma symptoms.
“A lot of them gave very clear history of not having a previous diagnosis of asthma,” Chang said. “By the time I heard the third story that morning, where they’re all like, ‘I don’t understand why I’m getting this,’ I began thinking: This is not a typical day. Something’s odd.”
She went downstairs to the ER to ask the doctors there if they’d noticed anything similar, and they had. She rang the after-hours pharmacy in another part of town, and they said the same. She and some colleagues did more research and eventually wrote up a case series about it — the first published record of a thunderstorm asthma event in the country.
A Million Tiny Disasters
Despite all this research, I can’t say definitively if thunderstorm asthma is what happened to me: Without lots of people presenting at the ER with the same symptoms, it’s difficult to confirm. Yet as Beggs told me, “I think that the more we study this, the more we’ll find that this very special interaction between thunderstorms and pollen grains might be a bit more common than we realize.”
Stewart agreed, “We suspect there’s a lot of isolated cases that kind of go under the radar and may or may not require attention from the health system, so no one particularly keeps records of them,” she said. “But for the individual, like you, they’re a big deal.”
What does the climate crisis feel like in your body? It’s easier to imagine it in the form of large-scale, dramatic events: settlements swept away in floods, towns torched in wildfires. But for many of us it will make landfall in a multitude of more intimate ways: prodding respiratory systems, immune responses, sex drives and decisions about whether to have babies, build homes, or save money. Meanwhile, blue sharks in some areas aren’t diving as deep as they used to because there’s not enough oxygen in the water, and baby puffins are choking on too-big fish; the hake and herring they usually eat have moved to colder waters.
How do we tend to this litany of little crises? The larger ones are easier to rally around when we’re energized by adrenaline and solidarity. The smaller hit scattershot: sporadic, uneven and frequently silent. In a cloud forest, a fruit bat starves as other hungry animals take shelter in the dwindling cool. A stallholder worries about the power bill after too many markets washed out by summer rain.
Weathering The Changes Together
I get home and, bed-bound and bored, finally sort out my life insurance, which costs more now because of the asthma attack. I tab over to Facebook and see a post from my friend Elspeth Fougere, who often writes about seasonal cycles and her observations of the natural world. It reads:
Feeling sort of wobbly and big feelings and in awe today, I wonder if you all are too? The sweltering heat and subtropical afternoon rains the last few days, like hot late summer downpours, is so unseasonal for spring … I even had a strawberry from my garden a few days ago, it was so sweet! but I remember the excitement when the strawberries were ready in time for Christmas…
I open a new tab and start searching for more clues about what might have caused my attack, and come across a short article about “thunderstorm asthma.” I start to put the pieces — tentatively, provisionally — together.
“What does the climate crisis feel like in your body?”
My first, rather egoic reaction is relief: See, look! Maybe it wasn’t just me and my reluctance to box-breathe; maybe it was a phenomenon. In the next moment, I feel suddenly overexposed and porous: one small, sentient part of a vast and vulnerable landscape. My body’s biome, a microcosm of the larger, was malfunctioning. I can breathe in oxygen, but can’t breathe out enough carbon dioxide. My blood is acidified like the warming ocean.
It’s tempting when confronting forces we can’t control, to build up our fortresses — to care for kin and friends — and leave others to do the same. To feel relieved when it’s not our home that’s flooding or our job that’s being cut. Yet, as Canadian activist Naomi Klein wrote in her book “Doppelganger,” and as the Covid-19 pandemic brought into confronting relief, “[W]e share the same air with people we don’t know, the same hospitals, the same biome… [W]e are enmeshed with one another, like it or not.”
To acknowledge that enmeshment is to grapple with how to live within a biome that might not simply “make it or die,” but instead inhabits what disability rights theorist Sunaura Taylor describes as a state of disability, of multiplicitous forms of impairment that require “assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.” Taylor highlights activism that offers “a vision of living with: a refusal to abandon, an insistence on staying with the trouble of a troubled landscape.”
The “trouble’” that’s making thunderstorm asthma more likely is a trouble I am implicated in. The pollen particles that likely inflamed my lungs are the seeds of an invasive colonizer, brought here as part of the process of turning these flatland forests into quasi-English meadows so that cows might make milk for my British ancestors’ cups of Earl Grey and meat for their Sunday roasts. I don’t think I need to list the multiple elements of my life — inhalers included! — that are heaping more CO2 onto the atmospheric pile, either.
I think again about the couple we met: the woman defiantly back in her garden; her partner’s clarity in coming to other people’s aid. “To me, it’s easy,” the firefighter had told me. “When you hear the call, someone needs help, so you go.”
The changes are coming quicker and faster now, and it’s hard to guess at all the ways they will infiltrate our bodies, our homes and our dreams. I want to weather these changes — the ones that touch me and the ones that strike others down — with a similarly straightforward sense of care and service. In the meantime, I’m using my inhalers, practicing my box breathing, watching the ryegrass on the bank as it pushes out the first green shoots of springtime, and looking to the sky.
