On Baby A's birthday, the c-section surgery went as planned. I walked into the OR around 9:30am and was pushed out around 2 hours later. W was instructed to wait outside while the team was getting me prepared for anesthesia. He then got invited to come in and sat next to me while the team worked on getting Baby A out of me 😂. W was a good DJ and Baby A was born while Taylor Swift's Shake It Off was being played. So...did I feel any pain during this life-changing surgery? No, I didn't. I had a spinal block. I never felt any type of pain during the surgery. Getting the anesthesia injected - however - was the most uncomfortable part of the surgery. There was a lot of pressure. I felt my back being pulled or pushed, or something. It just felt very uncomfortable, not painful, but very uncomfortable. It was also hard to try leaning toward the source of that uncomfortableness. Learning to relax while being uncomfortable was a very hard thing to do. But it was necessary. Once it...
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| Red sun & orange sky on Thursday |
Last Thursday I woke up to an eerie view of "orange sky." I remember thinking "is it close to sunset? did I oversleep by that much??" The truth was yea I overslept but it wasn't even noon yet. So the orange sky was....not because it was close to sunset. It was orange because of the thick smoke that covered pretty much all of the West Coast of the US. According to NASA, the smoke particles block shorter wavelength colors like green and blue while the longer wavelength colors like orange and red can still go through.
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| So much fire burning concurrently as of Sep 10 |
That was Thursday. Now it's Tuesday early morning. Much of last week's wildfires are still burning even at the time of writing this. Since last week, over 30 wildfires have been burning concurrently across the state of Oregon, our neighboring states Washington, California, and Idaho also suffer from wildfires and hazardous air.
Wildfires, smoky sky, unhealthy/hazardous air, and staying alert with changing levels of evacuation orders have been ongoing for so many people here. This didn't just happened for a day or over the weekend. There was a huge windstorm last Monday, and Oregon has been dry for the past few weeks. Dry wind ignited wildfires and they expanded so quickly that many people were told to leave their homes within hours. To be honest, I was a bit surprised that much of the news media only reported about the wildfires in California and almost didn't mention the spread and severity of wildfires in Oregon and Washington until Friday, so around 3-4 days into the astonishing spread of wildfires.
The dense smoke caused by unprecedented amount of wildfires deteriorated all of West Coast's air quality. The air quality index (AQI) for our city (Beaverton, OR) right now is 323. To put things in perspective, the AQI for our town was around 30 before the large blazes emerged. Air quality is usually considered unhealthy once the AQI hits100.
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| (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, https://www3.epa.gov/airnow/aqi_brochure_02_14.pdf) |
Several news media are also citing IQAir for reporting Portland (about 20 minutes drive from us) ranking at #1 for world's worst air quality (among major cities).
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| (IQAir, https://www.iqair.com/us/world-air-quality-ranking) |
One caveat in this "ranking" though is that the list only includes major cities. So it doesn't really capture the severity of bad air some smaller cities are suffering with. For example, Eugene has an AQI of around 404, much higher than the value of 306 for Portland. Still, the list offers a glimpse of what's happening here.
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| Purple and brown numbers indicate hazardous air quality. Red and orange numbers indicate unhealthy air. Yellow suggests moderate level of air quality. Green means good air quality. (zoomed-in image from Air Pollution in North America: Real-time Air Quality Index Visual Map https://aqicn.org/map/northamerica/) |
Hope the wildfires get put out soon. Also need that rain fast. ☂
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