Hottest Amputee Summer EVER

While our planet is reaching record-high temperatures, lower limb amputees everywhere are SWEATY. I don't mean dress in breathable fabrics and wear deodorant sweaty. I mean losing prosthetic suction and daily heat rash kind of sweaty. Walk as swiftly as possible from the house to the air-conditioned car before your fake leg slides off sweaty. I don't even remember what jeans feel like. Long sleeve, who? The combination of the post-cancer hormonal swings and a fake metal leg that attracts heat and doesn't allow the skin on my residual limb to breathe has me feeling like a vampire that only comes out after 8 pm when the sun and humidity take a slight, and I mean a slight dip.

I honestly can't remember the last time I didn't get an excessive heat warning on my phone, and my swimming pool feels like a bowl of ramen broth. Things have gotten so bad that I'm currently consulting with my dermatologist to see if my health insurance will cover a sweat treatment that involves poking my residual limb over fifty times with a needle to maybe give me six months of relief.

I don't want to disregard the fact that these blazing temperatures are clearly related to climate change. Wildfires, raging storms, glaciers melting, and rivers rising enough to take entire homes with them all at once on our planet is no coincidence. Personally, feeling how much warmer this summer has been in the unique way an amputee experiences it makes it so that no matter how often I turn off the news or scroll past the articles, I still can't ignore it.

The planet is melting, and I'm over here wondering what the highest temperature a microprocessor leg can withstand before it turns into a hot, heavy hunk of metal that I have to drag around like a zombie from the global warming apocalypse. So what have I been doing to get by besides staying at home in the AC as much as possible? I've been using the liner wand system religiously every two weeks and washing my liner with the non-soap cleanser daily. I've been planning nighttime outings over daytime outings and showering a million times a day. I also regularly curse when I have to do laundry in my sweltering garage and then proceed to run inside and stick my face in the freezer. We do what we have to do to get by during the sweaty survival times. May we all feel the sweet relief of mid-eighties temperatures sometime soon.