The High Desert
There is a scene in Lawrence of Arabia where someone asks Lawrence what he likes so much about the desert and he says "It's clean."
I arrived in the High Desert of Southern California some months after the above video was filmed. My recollection is I watched Frozen when it first premiered on MTV, enthralled to see the alien landscape to which I would soon be moving.
It's possibly the only video I caught the world premiere for and I watched it when it premiered for that reason: It was filmed not far from the military base to which I was moving.
All our goods had been in storage for some months, plus I got back my furniture that I had left with my sister when I left for Germany some years earlier. When she returned my borrowed furniture to me, she threw in a hand-me-down bedroom set of a quality I could not have afforded.
The two different trucks arrived ten minutes apart and I supervised both trucks being unloaded.
It was summer, July I think, and the High Desert is very hot and dry. It's routinely well above a hundred degrees that time of year.
Maybe a week later, I dragged my king-sized mattress down the stairs and out to the backyard to sun it. I wasn't sleeping well and the longer I laid there, the more tired I felt.
Sunning the mattress in the extreme dry heat resolved that issue. Ultimately, I sunned all our mattresses at least once a year the whole time I lived there and sometimes sunned upholstered furniture as well.
I lived at 3000 feet above sea level. I no longer clearly remember how long I was there. I want to say 2.75 years but I think I once double-checked that only to realize I was misremembering it.
The first few weeks I was there, I kept waking up in the middle of the night gasping for air. Like most people with my condition, in my youth I had a freakishly small ribcage and underdeveloped lungs.
My bra size permanently changed due to living at altitude in the High Desert. Not the cup size, which is about breast size, but the band size, which is a measure around the ribcage.
When we moved away, I was already very sick. We moved in November and we spent a few weeks in temporary quarters before getting an apartment in December just before Christmas.
In early January, ten weeks of chronic sinusitis turned to pneumonia. The drugs weren't immediately helping and I had a moment where I felt certain that I was in real danger of dying within the next 24 hours. Thus began about 3.5 months of being mostly bedridden before I was finally diagnosed with atypical CF in May.
I believe moving away from the High Desert is part of what caused things to go from bad to worse. I believe the hand-me-down mattress had serious issues and those were kept tolerable while I was in the High Desert and able to sun it every July in 115 degree heat or whatever. I think it very quickly became dramatically worse after another month in storage and then being in a more humid climate in the San Francisco Bay Area, just a few feet above sea level.
And I believe I survived that round of pneumonia and being mostly bedridden for months while laying all day on a mattress making me sicker in part due to my increased lung capacity from living at altitude for however the hell long I had been in the High Desert.
I guess you can do the math yourself. The above video came out in 1998. I moved to the High Desert that summer, late June or early July, and left in November of 2000 as my diagnosis was in May of 2001.
I know for a fact it was November because they packed our household goods on our wedding anniversary. So I am confident I remember the date in spite of all the drugs I've taken, the fact that I no longer have a near photographic memory for some things and generally have Swiss cheese for brains these days.
I arrived in the High Desert of Southern California some months after the above video was filmed. My recollection is I watched Frozen when it first premiered on MTV, enthralled to see the alien landscape to which I would soon be moving.
It's possibly the only video I caught the world premiere for and I watched it when it premiered for that reason: It was filmed not far from the military base to which I was moving.
All our goods had been in storage for some months, plus I got back my furniture that I had left with my sister when I left for Germany some years earlier. When she returned my borrowed furniture to me, she threw in a hand-me-down bedroom set of a quality I could not have afforded.
The two different trucks arrived ten minutes apart and I supervised both trucks being unloaded.
It was summer, July I think, and the High Desert is very hot and dry. It's routinely well above a hundred degrees that time of year.
Maybe a week later, I dragged my king-sized mattress down the stairs and out to the backyard to sun it. I wasn't sleeping well and the longer I laid there, the more tired I felt.
Sunning the mattress in the extreme dry heat resolved that issue. Ultimately, I sunned all our mattresses at least once a year the whole time I lived there and sometimes sunned upholstered furniture as well.
I lived at 3000 feet above sea level. I no longer clearly remember how long I was there. I want to say 2.75 years but I think I once double-checked that only to realize I was misremembering it.
The first few weeks I was there, I kept waking up in the middle of the night gasping for air. Like most people with my condition, in my youth I had a freakishly small ribcage and underdeveloped lungs.
My bra size permanently changed due to living at altitude in the High Desert. Not the cup size, which is about breast size, but the band size, which is a measure around the ribcage.
When we moved away, I was already very sick. We moved in November and we spent a few weeks in temporary quarters before getting an apartment in December just before Christmas.
In early January, ten weeks of chronic sinusitis turned to pneumonia. The drugs weren't immediately helping and I had a moment where I felt certain that I was in real danger of dying within the next 24 hours. Thus began about 3.5 months of being mostly bedridden before I was finally diagnosed with atypical CF in May.
I believe moving away from the High Desert is part of what caused things to go from bad to worse. I believe the hand-me-down mattress had serious issues and those were kept tolerable while I was in the High Desert and able to sun it every July in 115 degree heat or whatever. I think it very quickly became dramatically worse after another month in storage and then being in a more humid climate in the San Francisco Bay Area, just a few feet above sea level.
And I believe I survived that round of pneumonia and being mostly bedridden for months while laying all day on a mattress making me sicker in part due to my increased lung capacity from living at altitude for however the hell long I had been in the High Desert.
I guess you can do the math yourself. The above video came out in 1998. I moved to the High Desert that summer, late June or early July, and left in November of 2000 as my diagnosis was in May of 2001.
I know for a fact it was November because they packed our household goods on our wedding anniversary. So I am confident I remember the date in spite of all the drugs I've taken, the fact that I no longer have a near photographic memory for some things and generally have Swiss cheese for brains these days.
