For the most part, you should view injured animals with extreme caution. Wild animals become more aggressive when wounded because they're scared and confused and may think you're trying to capitalize on their vulnerable state. They're more likely to lash out and bite or scratch you than to accept your help. Natural State Wildlife Solutions
The Wildlife Urban Interface in California is a lattice pattern on a map, a scatter of jagged orange globs where communities are particularly at risk for wildfire. As the cost of living shows no signs of abating closer to the coast, Californians have increasingly moved inland, putting themselves ever more at risk of an uncontrollable wildfire the likes of which we experience so regularly now that many of us keep air purifiers running from April until late November.
When a community burns in California, it doesn’t just displace people. It also displaces species. Coyotes, mountain lions and bears are now regularly seen rooting through suburban trash cans and carrying away people’s tiny dogs. This is just survival instinct at work. A displaced species has no choice but to invade another species’ territory. We built homes on their homes and now we expect them not to act like animals. In cities, you often see the tiny dogs wearing tiny vests bristling with metal spikes, to make the dog less appetizing to an opportunistic coyote.
When animals are burned or hurt by a wildfire, their first instinct is to flee. People in the wildlife interface will sometimes refuse to go as a wildfire advances, confident that fire-resistant landscaping and a hose will be enough. A person wounded in fire, however, always seeks out help, because we know that it’s available. Someone wants to help. A wounded animal hides. It licks its wounds.
San Francisco coyote, via KQED
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I’m teaching online this summer, and each day I record a short lecture for the students, who are all over the world and attending asynchronously. When I set up the course website a few weeks back, videos migrated from last summers’ course, which happened just a few months after I finished nine months of aggressive treatment for aggressive breast cancer. Fight fire with fire, so to speak.
Last summer, I was on an experimental high dose of a CDK 4&6 inhibiting drug, a medication that would supposedly reduce the risk that my cancer would return. The medication caused severe problems with my liver, and nausea and bowel issues prevented me from driving more than ten minutes from the nearest toilet. My chest was so scarred and burned from surgery and radiation that I couldn’t move my left arm for almost a year. When I look at those videos from last summer’s class, I look wrecked. My oncologist took me off the CDK meds after a few months, but my liver didn’t return to normal for half a year more. I was wounded, and wanted to hide.
But in that sickly state, I taught my online class, had a few weeks off, and then returned to teaching three in person classes a day. Chemo had rotted my brain and I couldn’t remember students’ names, lost my way walking around campus, and was so tired sometimes there was a real temptation to lay my head on the desk and rest midway through class. This is just what you do when you get sick in America. You have to make a living.
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A year later, I still don’t recognize myself. The physical changes bring me down every day. But the biggest difference is that while I was introverted before, there are now far more days when being around people is just too much. Crowds in particular have become a source of fight or flight level anxiety, the press of bodies, the heat, the noise.
Small talk at parties and meetings, the bane of every introvert, has turned into a negotiation between my subconscious (run, hide) and superego (cancer is punishment, you are ugly and bad). But if I don’t go to the happy hour at work or the barbecue or the concert, do I even exist?
Like an animal displaced by a wildfire, in this burned and scarred form, there are many days I just want to crawl into a cave and lick my wounds.
The cancer industrial complex tells people that at the end of treatment, you should do something spectacular. Head out on a pink-themed breast cancer cruise. Buy a new car and drive it to the Beyonce concert. Go to Burning Man and have sex with a bunch of strangers. You earned it. But the reality is that cancer shrinks your world and you can’t just step back from the hidden world of illness into an expansive vision of life. There is a transition between brushing up against death and learning, yet again, to live. And underneath everything, there’s always the pulsing awareness that you are on borrowed time.
The doctors recently put me on yet another medication that will supposedly turn down the volume on the nightmares where I’m trapped in an MRI, blunt the panic attacks at every blood draw or infusion, and make it easier to have a normal conversation in a crowded room. For the entire month of June these pills made me feel like someone had a hand on top of my head and was pushing it under water. These days, they just make me feel stupid and slow.
This is the tradeoff for being alive. Retreating from the world is a luxury. Solitude is for those who can afford it. Proof of life, evidence of survival, this requires you to nod and smile and go to work. Some days it’s not that bad. Some days are even spectacular. But for the rest of your days, whether many or few, a version of you will always be curled up and shivering, trying to stay hidden in this burning world.