Killing me slowly?

Here is a micrograph of the lung tissue of a 61-year-old potter suffering from silicosis.

http://www.silicosis-net.org/images/pmf-medium.jpg

Gross, no? If you can't tell, all the little black specks are "silicotic nodules", which are bad. Also the dark portion in the upper right is "diffuse plural fibrosis", which also is bad. And this is why I can't be an art major and become a potter and live in a shack in my happy place where the honu are making pots all day the way I would dearly love to. That and the fact that I would make exactly 0 money. But this entry is specifically about the health risks of being a potter, because part of this project is to learn things about working with clay that I didn't know before, and this fits like a whatsit into that category.

Silicosis is also called potter's rot and is what you get from inhaling dry silica (silicon dioxide/SiO2) dust, the main component of clay, if the particles are less than 10 micrometers in diameter. The particles are then too fine to be filtered out or caught in the mucus and nice fluids that the body makes for the express purpose of filtering out such particles. The disease can occur from contact with crystalline silica in any form. (Apparently the stuff has multiple forms).

There are four different kinds of silicosis: chronic, accelerated, simple, and acute. The symptoms are all about the same for each type, and the symptoms are nasty, from chronic cough to increased risk of TB to  right ventricle heart disease and oh yeah, death. Huh. I always get sinus infections from working in the studio too long but I never knew it could actually kill me. And before you say it won't kill me because I've only been at it a few years, the acute kind of silicosis can take you out in five weeks. So. 

Just putting that out there. I sacrifice for my art, is what I'm saying.

Before I leave you to ponder the tragedy of my slow death by silicosis, here is a fact which you may not know. The condition is also called pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is officially the longest word ever to appear in an English dictionary. 

Source: http://www.silicosis-net.org/silicosis-symtoms-diagnosis.htm?GAWS&type=search&keyword=silicosis&adid=2168260035&placement=&gclid=CLrz39yK7acCFcW5Kgod0Viobw