SUMMER

Sweat is typically seen as gross, not delicious. You know those summer moments when you’re so uncomfortably hot your forehead almost slides right off your face? Or when a trickle of sweat runs the entire length of your leg, gaining momentum until it joins the larger puddle collecting in your shoe? Unquestionably disgusting.

But the thing is, my sweat is really quite tasty. (I’m aware that is a genuinely yuck, if not completely repulsive thing to say, but hear me out.) Without an inch of exaggeration, my sweat tastes like a bag of chips. A good bag, too – we’re talking top shelf of an independent supermarket in a bougie coastal town, not a vending machine at a public pool.

I always knew my sweat was salty, but I thought that was just normal. It wasn’t until after a particularly hectic school PE session that I noticed there were literally salt flakes on my arm. I asked my friends whether everyone produced salt with their limbs, like they themselves were the Himalayas, but it seemed I was alone in my salt-producing ways.

A little later, I noticed that after riding my bike to a restaurant in peak summer, I had to wipe away the salt crystals that dried around my eyebrows and nose before actually sitting down. I also noted that standing around at a bar in the sun for an afternoon made my legs look like the rim of a margarita glass. Also, dogs loved to lick my legs! I was essentially a human-sized salt lick.

I had a new party trick. “LICK MY ARM!” I encouraged my friends (this was clearly pre-pandemic, when licking your friends’ limbs was less of a biohazard). Though not many mates indulged, they were impressed by my ability to season my meals with a sweep of my forearm.

Turns out my salt-producing ways are less of a magical power and more a result of having cystic fibrosis, a chronic illness that affects “your lungs and digestive system”. That’s how I describe it to others, anyway. If I had bothered to research it properly for most of my life, I may have realised that CF is actually caused by a faulty gene that controls the movement of chloride and water into and out of cells, which is why my skin is three to four times saltier than the average sweaty person.

In fact, back in ye olden days, people used to lick the foreheads of recently born babies, and if they were salty, declare the child bewitched and likely to die soon. Yikes! Well, get me a cauldron, stat, because we’re cookin’ up a big batch of something deliciously salty – no shakers or grinders required!

There have been lots of medical breakthroughs in CF research since the days of licking babies’ heads (thank fuck). One of the more recent ones is a group of new drugs called ‘gene modulators’, which actually correct the dodgy gene that causes CF. Which means salt travels through your cells properly, which means… no more salty skin! Boooo. But also, yay for the many, many benefits the super-drugs bring. If I’m honest, being able to breathe more easily and having way more energy is a lot more useful than being a human salt flat.

So these days, when it’s a banging summer day, the sweat dries on my skin without producing any cute little salt crystals. It means my body is functioning a lot better, but even so, part of me really misses it. I guess I’ll just have to carry around a little box of salt flakes like an absolute pleb.