When Bryan Vega takes the straight road through the Holtville carrot farms to see his doctor across the border in Mexicali, he makes a day of it.
“What were you doing in Mexico?” the U.S. Border Patrol agent asked him on the way back.
A check up, a meal, a haircut, a walk on the streets his family has long crisscrossed, a pitstop in the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe to pray, another meal.
It’s what he would do with his mom, or his dad or his grandmother. Today he takes his little brother Alexis, and he knows he is sharing a tradition – but he also knows it’s a necessity. In Baja California’s capital city, he can get the care he needs.
When Vega’s lung collapsed the first time, he was in Los Angeles, far from his family home. He got COVID, then pneumonia, then it collapsed. L.A. doctors reinflated it, and when he arrived home to Imperial Valley for a visit, it collapsed again. This time doctors in Mexicali reinflated it.
And then they ran more tests.
Doctors said Imperial Valley air was largely to blame for his 24-year-old lung folding under pressure — twice.
Respiratory illnesses are nothing new in the valley.
It has the state’s highest rates of children ending up in the emergency room to manage their asthma, a sign of poor asthma control in a population. For decades the region has earned a failing grade for air quality from the American Lung Association.
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