Editor’s Note: All images were provided by the author.
Samuel Lee (University of Pennsylvania)
At Bellevue Hospital in New York, the weather never really stayed outside. I didn’t understand that at first. Like a lot of people, I still imagined weather as background, something happening beyond the windows, something you checked on your phone before leaving the house. Rainy. Cold. Too hot. Fine.
But in the emergency department, it kept showing up in other ways. In wet coats that never quite dried. In coughs that sounded harsher after a long night outside. In the way someone arrived already irritated, already exhausted, already done with being told to wait one more hour, fill out one more form, explain one more time why they were there.
Weather was never just weather there. It came in attached to bodies.
One night, not even ten minutes after a young woman had been admitted, she was already halfway to the ED door. The attending was explaining why she needed to stay. The social worker tried too. I was standing there with a blanket, sort of hovering, feeling useless in that very specific way you do when everyone around you has actual training and you are just there.
Then I looked down and saw her shoes. Soaked through, not damp but genuinely soaked, the leather darkened and pulling away from the sole.
I don’t know why that stopped me the way it did. She wasn’t just guarded or difficult or whatever word someone might have used in a bad mood.
She looked like the weather had already been working on her for hours before she got anywhere near us, grinding her down to something colder and smaller than she’d started the day as.
So I grabbed hospital socks and some warm broth, not because I had some brilliant instinct, but honestly because I just couldn’t stand it.
When I handed them to her, she stopped. She sat down and pulled on the socks. I asked, “Better?” and she nodded, still not looking at me, but something in her face unclenched. Then a nurse came over and, instead of launching back into the medical explanation, just said, “Rough night?” And that, somehow, was the thing that got her to answer.
I’ve been thinking about that night a lot while trying to write this, partly because I kept wanting my climate story to sound bigger than it is, more obvious, more cinematic, something about smoke-filled skies or a flooded street or one terrible heat wave where everything changed all at once. Those stories matter. But that’s not how climate change has entered my life most often.
More often, it enters sideways, through accumulation, through the ordinary violence of having to move through heat and cold and rain and bad air and unstable infrastructure when you don’t have the protection to buffer any of it.
That’s what I started noticing at Bellevue. The patient whose body was already overwhelmed, and then the weather pushed things a little further, the heat making nausea worse, the cold making pain harder to bear, the storm delaying the medication or the bus or just the last thin thread of patience someone had left. Not enough to make a headline, but enough to make someone sicker, angrier, less able to wait calmly while a system asked still more from them.
And it doesn’t land the same way for everyone. Some people experience it as an inconvenience, running from their car to a building, complaining about the forecast, ordering delivery instead of going out. Other people have to stay in it, work in it, commute through it, sleep in it, and then show up to a hospital carrying all of it on their body.
Climate change doesn’t create vulnerability from nothing. It finds what was already fragile and presses there.
I already knew something about that before Bellevue. When both of my parents were sick with cancer, I learned fast how quickly one problem becomes five. There was a stretch when I was regularly calling insurance companies, and I had taught myself to lower my voice slightly and speak more slowly, because I figured out after a few humiliating calls that if I sounded like a teenager, they would put me on hold and never come back. I remember the particular effort of that performance, the way I had to consciously work to keep my voice even and sound certain, trying to come across as someone worth listening to. Illness was never just illness. It was also whether I could pull that off on a given afternoon, and some days, depending on how long I’d already been on hold or how close I was to the edge of what I could manage, I couldn’t. I think there was a specific tiredness to that: not just being worn down, but being worn down by the effort of staying functional inside a system that required you to perform competence in order to receive basic care. The weather of my family’s situation didn’t cause the crisis. It found the cracks and moved in.
Climate change, the version I’ve come to recognize, feels like that, not catastrophe so much as amplification. The person who was already one bad day from the edge now has to deal with the heat too, or the storm, or the building that traps warmth, or the medication that cannot wait even if the weather says stay home.
What unsettles me most isn’t that I know this. It’s how easy it is to stop noticing. You can get used to it. The wet shoes start to seem like just part of the picture, just how things are, just what some people are dealing with, and not something that the weather and the city and the cost of a cab and about forty other structural failures conspired to put there together. And there’s something worse underneath the not-noticing: the possibility that the system I was briefly part of (the hospital, the forms, the waiting) was also one of the structures pressing on her. That I wasn’t just a witness to it.
A soaked pair of shoes should not be the thing that determines whether someone can stay long enough to receive care, but sometimes that’s exactly what it comes down to, something small and easy to overlook if you’re only listening for the biggest problem in the room.
I think what scares me most, if I’m being honest, is that I almost didn’t notice the shoes either. I was holding a blanket and looking at her face, doing what I thought I was supposed to do, and it took something catching in me, some reflex I didn’t know I had, to look down. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t. I don’t know how many times I’ve already looked past something just like it and felt nothing catch at all.
When I picture climate change now, I don’t picture a graph first, or a polar bear, or even the skyline under strange air. I picture a hospital floor with a puddle spreading slowly under someone’s shoes, and the uncomfortable, creeping feeling of water seeping through leather, the kind of cold that settles into you before you ever reach anywhere warm.
The weather came in with her, not as metaphor, but as part of the actual conditions of her care.
That’s my climate story, and I’m still learning what to do with it.