What will happen if I get a migraine while I’m driving on the highway? What will I do if I wake up in the field and my blood pressure just won’t behave, and I can’t stand up? With Postural Orthostatic Tachycardiac Syndrome (POTS), these parts of my daily life get amplified – silently and often invisibly – when I’m in the field. Beyond the logistics of bringing all the right supplies, there’s inherent anxiety in uncertainty. Planning for fieldwork with a chronic illness – especially one that can be unpredictable and worse with heat and exertion – is stressful, to say the least. I looked at the shadeless slope I would be spending my day on, and I hoped that I’d prepared enough that would keep me from getting too dizzy, losing feeling in my limbs, or even passing out. I had over four liters of water in my pack. I checked my pockets yes, I had my electrolyte tablets and extra protein bars. Standing still, it read 130 beats per minute. I glanced at my GPS watch, which also has a heart beat monitor. It was midmorning but already hot enough to have forced off my requisite flannel. Sage bushes six feet tall, dense as a jungle, covered the silty valley floor, with a parched riverbed cutting an empty swath through the green. A cloudless blue sky stretched between two buttes, miles apart, a dried-out valley filling the expanse between their dusty red walls. I was standing at the base of an outcrop in the middle of Wyoming’s desert, one of the emptiest and most desolate places I’ve ever been.

Uf shands scribe