I’ve spent the last 12 years trying to spread the word that air pollution is a serious public health hazard. I’m used to giving lectures and writing book chapters and essays about air pollution using research, statistics, graphs, pictures, and stories from patients and colleagues. But I never expected that someday I would become a pollution statistic myself or a point on those disturbing graphs.
I have just been released from what felt like a century in a medieval prison — 60 torturous hours immobilized in an ICU, attached to dozens of tubes, wires, drips, monitors, scanners and alarms, for a rare condition that threatens life and limb without knowing what the outcome would be.